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Construction leads

The phrase "free construction leads" gets 140 US searches a month, and the advertisers bidding on it pay $32.10 a click. Somebody is spending thirty-two dollars to put a form in front of a contractor who typed the word free.

Arseniy VolosevichFounder, More Quotes·Updated Sep 7, 2026·9 min read

That is the whole market in one line. Construction leads are a product with a price, a supply chain and a resale market, and most of the people explaining them to you are standing on one end of it.

Page one is a shopping aisle

We pulled the live US desktop results on 7 September 2026. Twenty-nine organic listings, no AI Overview, and seven of them sell you lead data or marketplace access. Three are YouTube videos, one is a thread in r/Construction, and the first marketing agency of any kind sits at position 22. Nobody typing this phrase is shopping for an agency. They want a list of vendors, and Google has given them one.

Position two is titled "Free Leads". Read the page and it is Construction Monitor, which collects building permit records weekly across 97 markets and sells them by subscription. The free part is a sample edition for your area. That is a real product with real buyers, mostly suppliers and subcontractors chasing work already in motion, and a permit record is by definition a project that has already cleared the permit office.

Position one is a blog post by a construction estimating firm listing five sites that will sell you leads. Its own lead service is number one on the list.

What a federal enforcement action found in the bought-lead business

Almost nothing in this industry is checkable. This part is, because the US government wrote it down.

In March 2022 the Federal Trade Commission issued an administrative complaint against HomeAdvisor, Inc., which also trades as Angi Leads. The complaint alleged that since at least mid-2014 the company had made false, misleading or unsubstantiated claims about the quality and source of the leads it sold to service providers, general contractors among them.

Four of the allegations are worth reading if you have ever bought a lead. That the leads were presented as consumers intending to hire soon, when many were not. That providers were told they would only get leads matching their trade and their chosen area, when many did not.

That leads described as coming from people who had knowingly asked HomeAdvisor for help were in fact bought from third-party affiliates running web forms. And that the company quoted lead-to-job rates higher than its own data could substantiate.

In January 2023 the Commission accepted a proposed consent order by a 4-0 vote requiring HomeAdvisor to pay up to $7.2 million and to stop making unsubstantiated claims about how often its leads turn into paying work. The order was finalized in April 2023. A consent order settles the matter without the company admitting the allegations, and the FTC's own note is that a complaint means it has reason to believe the law was broken, not that a court has ruled.

Then the arithmetic. In November 2023 the FTC mailed 110,372 checks to eligible home service providers, totaling more than $3 million. That is roughly $27 each, against an order that capped the lead-quality payments at $30 a provider. Years of it, across a hundred thousand businesses, and the remedy came to about the price of one lead.

Then there is the reason we wrote this page. On the results we pulled this week, the number one article and the article at position nine both list HomeAdvisor among the best places to buy construction leads. The position nine piece is dated May 2026, and its own comparison table gives the exclusivity of those leads as "Shared".

Google's first page has not caught up with a matter that closed three years ago, and the honest version of that column is sitting on it in plain sight. There is more on the same company in our answer on whether Angi leads are worth it.

Bought, shared, generated: three different products

"Lead" gets used for all three and they behave nothing alike.

A bought lead is a record someone else collected and sold to you, and usually to others. A shared lead is the same thing with the sharing stated out loud, so your job is to call first. A generated lead came from an ad or a page that names your company, and no one else receives it. The first two get cheaper as you buy more. The third gets better as you run it longer, because the audience and the offer sharpen.

Referrals close best and you cannot order more of them on a Tuesday. That is the gap the other rows exist to fill, and it is the argument laid out in full in our guide to where construction work actually comes from.

Commercial builders search for leads, not for marketing

Every previous page in this series found commercial search demand buried. "Commercial construction marketing" measures 20 searches a month against 590 for "marketing for construction companies". On lead terms the gap almost closes: "commercial construction leads" gets 110 a month and "residential construction leads" gets 90. Same country, same week, same data source.

So the people running commercial work are searching. They are just not searching for marketing help, they are searching for projects to bid. Anyone selling a commercial builder on brand awareness is answering a question that measures 20, while the one that measures 110 goes to bid boards. Our read of that market split is in the section on the half of US construction nobody writes for.

If you build for private clients, paid social is the fastest way to control how many conversations arrive next month, and the numbers below are yours. If you build commercial, the bid boards are table stakes and the work is being visible to the handful of owners and developers in your market with a project this year. Fewer leads, higher cost each, worth considerably more when they land.

What we pay for a construction lead

Two US construction accounts, all Meta spend, pulled from our reporting tables on 7 September 2026: $9,860.85 spent, 221,764 impressions, 3,261 link clicks, 149 leads. That is $66.18 a lead, $3.02 a click, and 4.57% of clicks becoming a lead.

Split by account, the older one has spent $7,332.37 since 11 June for 117 leads at $62.67. The newer one started 12 August and sits at $2,528.48 for 32 leads at $79.02, and that figure fell from $83.40 in twenty-four hours because three more leads landed. On a young account every day of spend moves the headline, which is why we re-pull these before writing rather than copying last week's number forward.

Both of these firms build for private clients, so read the whole thing as a residential picture. Two accounts is a small sample and we are not going to call it a benchmark. What it is good for is the comparison: a click aimed at an actual customer costs us $3.02, while a click on the phrase contractors themselves search runs $40 to $85 because the bidders are selling to you.

A few honest answers

How much do contractors pay for leads?

Bought residential leads commonly run from the mid teens for small jobs to well over $100 for high-value work, priced by trade, job size and market. Our own generated leads averaged $66.18 across 149 of them this summer.

Compare cost per signed job instead. A $40 lead shared with four contractors and a $90 lead only you receive are not the same purchase, and the cheaper column wins on the invoice and loses on the calendar.

How do you generate construction leads for free?

Ask past clients directly, claim and fill out your Google Business Profile, post finished jobs with the actual scope and location, and answer local questions where your buyers already are. None of it costs money and all of it costs time, which is the part that gets left out.

It also does not scale on command. Free works while you have capacity to spare and stops being a plan the month you need eight jobs.

What is the best site for construction leads?

It depends what you build. Permit and project databases suit subcontractors and suppliers, bid boards suit commercial general contractors, and consumer marketplaces suit trades doing volume residential work. For custom and high-ticket private-client work, the sites are usually the weakest option on the list because you are buying a shared record.

Are bought construction leads worth it?

They can be, if you call within minutes, expect to be one of several, and track cost per signed job rather than per lead. Plenty of contractors run them profitably at volume.

Where they fall down is control. You do not set how many arrive, who else gets them, or what was promised to the person on the other end before you called.

How long before lead generation produces signed work?

Paid social produces conversations in days and signed contracts on your normal sales cycle, so a remodeler sees it inside a month and a custom builder measures it in quarters. Search and content take months before they carry weight, then keep paying without a media budget.

Where these numbers come from

Search results and volumes: the live US desktop results for "construction leads" and Google Ads keyword data for the surrounding terms, both pulled 7 September 2026. Volumes are per term and not summed, because Google groups close variants and adding them up invents demand.

Enforcement record: the FTC's administrative complaint of 11 March 2022, its proposed consent order of 23 January 2023, the final order of April 2023 and the refund announcement of November 2023, all read at ftc.gov. The per-check figure is our arithmetic on the FTC's own totals.

Ad figures: two US construction accounts we manage, all Meta spend in our reporting tables, pulled 7 September 2026. Both build for private clients, so read them as a residential picture.

If you want this run for you

We write the offer, make the creative, run the ads, qualify the replies and put booked consultations on your calendar. Nobody else gets those conversations, and you know the cost of each one on the day it happens.

If you would rather build it yourself, the rest of the guides are here. Both routes work, and one of them is faster.