Last updated 21 October 2026
Half the decking leads start with ripping out the old deck.
Leads Do Work sells a decking lead for £25 plus VAT and charges £11 a week on top. Nobody else we checked publishes a decking price. Lead Pronto and Zapo sell decking as landscaping, and Checkatrade has no decking page for trades at all. Buy the click from Google yourself and a homeowner looking for a decking installer costs you £2.60 to £10.04.
Each of those is a flat price per lead. Behind it might be a small repair, a new composite deck, or an old one that has to come up first, and you pay the same to find out which.
Two leads at one price
"replace old decking in garden. 5x4m"
"Sleepers around a fish pond im building"
Both sat on Leads Do Work's public decking feed on 2 October 2026. Of the 10 newest leads there, 5 were replacing a deck that's already in the garden, and one wasn't a deck at all. What each size of job is worth.
Where we stand
We don't sell decking leads. We help you get your own.
This guide is the honest version of what buying decking leads costs, and who else gets them. What we do instead is build decking installers a website that turns visits into calls, and run Google Ads in an account in your own name, so every lead that comes in is a customer who found you, and nobody else was sold it.
From a repair to a full deck
One £25 lead, for a £330 repair or a £3,500 composite new deck.
MyJobQuote's cost guides, built from quotes on its own platform, put a repair to rot or mould at £165 to £495, a small pressure-treated pine deck at £600 to £800, a 30 square metre timber deck at about £2,600 and 40 square metres of composite at £2,600 to £4,400. This is what one won customer costs you at each size.
| Job | Typical UK price | Leads Do Work, £25 a lead | Zapo, about £40 a lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Repair rot or mould in a deck | £165 to £495 | £75 a win, 23% of it | £120 a win, 36% of it |
| Pressure-treated pine deck, 10 to 15 m² | £600 to £800 | £75 a win, 11% of it | £120 a win, 17% of it |
| Composite deck, 15 m² | £975 to £1,650 | £75 a win, 6% of it | £120 a win, 9% of it |
| Composite deck, 25 m² | £1,650 to £2,750 | £75 a win, 3% of it | £120 a win, 5% of it |
| Timber deck, 30 m², mid-range boards | £2,600 | £75 a win, 3% of it | £120 a win, 5% of it |
| Composite deck, 40 m² | £2,600 to £4,400 | £75 a win, 2% of it | £120 a win, 3% of it |
All prices from MyJobQuote's garden, timber and composite decking guides (August to October 2026), each worked at the middle of its range. We've used one win in 3 throughout because that's the rate MyJobQuote tells its own trades to expect. Zapo's figure is its £400 starting plan divided by the 10 leads it forecasts, and neither lead price includes VAT.
A rough guide in the trade is that winning a customer should cost 10 to 15 percent of the job. At £75 a win, the Leads Do Work lead takes 23% of a repair and 11% of a small pine deck, then drops to 6% of 15 square metres of composite and 2% of 40. Zapo's lead takes 36% of the repair. Bark's own price guide puts the average deck or porch job at £2,500, which is the size of job a bought lead can carry. The repairs are where it can't.
If the lead is a replacement
MyJobQuote puts a full replacement at £90 to £180 a square metre and says taking the old deck off can make it dearer than a new one. Removal alone runs £110 to £550. Ask before you drive out whether the old frame stays, and price the strip-out and the skip as their own line. One MyBuilder lead wanted a new deck because the wood underneath "rotted after 10 years". The FMB says joists laid on the ground, "even if they're not in the ground", need timber treated to Use Class 4, so put that on the quote.
If the lead is a pond or a patio
Not every decking lead is decking. The feed above had sleepers round a fish pond and a customer swapping a slabbed patio for a deck. If you build the whole garden, read our landscaping leads guide. A deck that's really a garden office belongs in our garden room leads guide, and the fence round it in our fencing leads guide.
Your numbers
Pick the size of deck, and see what a lead is worth to you.
Start from a repair, a pine deck or a composite one, or type in what your average job is worth. Then tell it your win rate and what a seller wants for each lead.
WHAT CAN YOU PAY FOR A DECKING LEAD?
Pick a job, or type in what yours are worth
Starts on one in three, the figure MyJobQuote tells its own trades to expect. Put in yours.
You can pay up to about
£110
a lead, winning one in 3
- Healthy range, per won job
- £220 to £330
- Which per lead is
- £73 to £110
Put a seller's price in the last box and this will tell you what each won job would cost you.
The 10 to 15 percent line is a working guide nobody has measured for decking, so check it against your own margins before you rely on it.
Who sells them
Seven places selling decking work, and who else gets the call.
Each row is taken from the seller's own website: a decking page, a price list or a help article. Three of them have no decking page and sell decking under another trade's name, or none.
| Seller | Price | Who else gets the lead | In their words |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leads Do Work | £25 + VAT a decking lead, £11 a week | 1 to 3 others, never over 5 | "sent to Connect accounts first" |
| Lead Pronto | From £15 a landscaping lead, decking included | Agreed before it starts | "agreed with you before launch" |
| Zapo (was Get Work) | £400 to £1,600 + VAT a month, sold as landscaping | Nobody | "exclusive to your business" |
| MyBuilder | A fee once the homeowner shortlists you | Any installer the homeowner shortlists | "Respond to as many leads as you like" |
| MyJobQuote | Not published | Up to 3 installers | "Up to 3 local Wooden Decking Installers" |
| Bark | Credits at £1.80 + VAT each | Up to 5 professionals | "£1.80 per credit" |
| Checkatrade | Not published, 12-month plan | Not stated on its gardener page | "Memberships are for 12 months." |
Leads Do Work: the only decking price on show
Its Connect price list puts "Garden | Decking" at £25 plus VAT for a homeowner lead and £31 for a business one. It also bills an £11 service charge every week, £572 plus VAT across a year, which is most of a small pine deck at £700, and it keeps running through the quiet winter months unless you pause the contract.
By its own terms, 1 to 3 other tradesmen normally chase the same job, and never more than 5. "The number of leads is not guaranteed, but we will strive to meet the agreed quota." Its decking page says the homeowners come from "a small network of 300+ websites and niche blogs in home improvement".
Lead Pronto and Zapo sell decking as landscaping
Neither has a decking page. Lead Pronto's landscaping leads cover "garden design, garden maintenance, turfing, driveways, patios, paving, lawn care, decking, fencing, lighting and more", from £15 a lead as a guide price, and "How the leads are distributed is agreed with you before launch." Zapo runs search ads for landscapers that it says bring leads "exclusive to your business", from £400 a month plus VAT with £200 of that as ad budget. Ask either one how many of those leads are decks. Lead Pronto is also the seller the ICO fined, covered below.
MyBuilder charges for the shortlist, not the job
Any number of installers can respond, and MyBuilder takes its fee when a homeowner shortlists you, whether or not you get the work; more in is MyBuilder worth it. Its decking sign-up page shows what comes in: a 13 square metre re-deck, a deck that "has started to collapse", a 17.6 square metre composite deck over a slabbed patio, and a customer whose deck "has to have the frame lowered".
MyJobQuote, Bark and Checkatrade: one job, several installers
MyJobQuote tells homeowners up to 3 decking installers will be in touch. Decking isn't on Bark's subscription marketplace, so installers still buy credits at £1.80 each plus VAT, with up to 5 professionals on the same job. Checkatrade has no decking page for trades; its landscaper link opens a page for gardeners selling a 12-month Fixed Plan with no price on it, and Rated People's leads now go to Checkatrade members. The shared-lead trap sets out what several quotes on one deck do to your margin.
Everything here about Leads Do Work's contract comes from its own published terms and conditions, last read on 2 October 2026. Terms get revised, so check yours against the current version before you act on anything.
Rather have decking leads that are yours alone?
That's what we do. We don't sell leads. We build the website and run the Google Ads that bring customers straight to you, in an ad account in your name that stays yours if you ever leave.
See pricingWant to know how many people near you search Google for what you do each month? Message us your town and we'll send you the real numbers.
Check my areaBuying the click yourself
49,500 people a month search composite decking. Most are buying the boards.
"composite decking" gets 49,500 UK searches a month and "decking" 22,200. The searches Google suggests around them are paint, oil, screws, kits and the names of DIY sheds. The ones that ask for somebody to fit it are in the hundreds: "decking installers near me" gets 590 and "composite decking installers" 590. Those are the ones to bid on. Average clicks run from £2.60 for "decking repair near me" to £10.04 for "decking company". We've turned clicks into leads with WordStream's 7.33% conversion rate for home improvement search ads, which comes from American accounts, so read the last column as a rough steer.
| Search | Searches a month | Per click | Per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| decking company | 260 | £10.04 | £137 |
| decking quotes | 170 | £8.91 | £122 |
| decking contractors | 140 | £8.76 | £120 |
| decking companies near me | 480 | £5.13 | £70 |
| decking installers near me | 590 | £4.80 | £65 |
| decking contractors near me | 720 | £4.58 | £62 |
| decking fitters near me | 480 | £4.52 | £62 |
| composite decking installers | 590 | £4.34 | £59 |
| decking replacement | 210 | £3.52 | £48 |
| decking repair near me | 390 | £2.60 | £35 |
Figures taken from Google Ads for UK searches on 2 October 2026. Each click price is an average of what advertisers bid in the auction, a guide to your bill rather than a quote for it.
Reaching a decking firm costs more than reaching its customer. "decking leads" is searched so rarely that Google returns no figures for it at all. The nearest seller search that has any is the trade the sellers file decking under: "landscaping leads" costs £54.88 a click, about 11 times the £5.13 it costs to reach a homeowner searching "decking companies near me". At £35 to £137 a lead, your own ads cost more than Leads Do Work's £25. What you get for it is control over which jobs you pay for:
- Bid on installer searches, not board searches
- Push budget into March, April and May
- Ask for the size and the old deck on your form
- The lead goes to you and nobody else
- Google bills you directly, with no markup
- The account stays in your name
To work out a sensible monthly figure, see how much to spend on Google Ads. If you have never run a campaign before, start with getting started with Google Ads as a tradesman.
Google Local Services Ads
Google's UK list for Local Services Ads has "Landscaping services" and no decking category, so the nearest fit for a decking firm is landscaping. Google vets the business before the ads go live and bills per lead, and in the UK there's no way to claim a bad lead back. Our Local Services Ads guide covers the vetting and what each lead costs.
Demand and season
Decking searches have fallen three years running. Repairs haven't moved.
Leads Do Work tells installers that "Demand for decking remains strong". We added up four years of UK searches, September to August each year. "Decking" fell every year, down 43% in all, and the searches that ask for an installer fell almost as far. Searches for a repair went up.
| Search | Sep 2022 to Aug 2023 | Sep 2025 to Aug 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| decking | 456,700 | 259,000 | -43% |
| composite decking | 881,300 | 599,700 | -32% |
| decking installers near me | 12,440 | 7,370 | -41% |
| decking companies near me | 8,700 | 5,370 | -38% |
| decking repair near me | 4,700 | 5,150 | +10% |
Google Ads monthly bands for the UK, added up, so read the totals as approximate.
A shrinking market doesn't mean no work, but it changes what a lead is worth to a seller and to you. Fewer homeowners searching means fewer leads to go round, and a weekly fee agreed on last year's volume has less to fill its quota with. The repair line is the other half of it: a fix rarely carries a bought lead, but it is the one part of the market that grew, and it's cheap to reach yourself at £2.60 a click.
UK searches for "decking companies near me", by month
September 2025 to August 2026. Google Ads keyword data, rounded bands.
Spring is the whole year's peak
Searches for "decking companies near me" peaked in March, April and May at 720 and bottomed out in November at 140, about 5.1 times lower. That's where the ad money earns its keep, and it's the stretch a weekly lead fee in winter is paying to wait for.
Before the first joist
Thirty centimetres decides whether the deck needs planning permission.
None of this shows up in a lead. Each one changes what you can build, what you quote, or who the customer has to speak to first. The planning rules here are England's.
Over 30cm, it's a raised platform
The 2015 order says "'raised' in relation to a platform means a platform with a height greater than 0.3 metres", and a raised platform isn't permitted development. The deck also has to stay behind the front wall of the house and keep, with other outbuildings, to 50% of the garden. On a slope, the government's guidance takes ground level as "the highest part of the surface of the ground next to the building". Measure before you price, and ask the council if you're close. One MyBuilder customer needed a deck's frame lowered.
Flats and listed buildings get no allowance
The Planning Portal says the decking allowances apply to houses and not to flats and maisonettes. "Within the curtilage of a listed building, no decking or platform is permitted." In National Parks, the Broads, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty and World Heritage Sites, decking more than 20 metres from the house is capped at 10 square metres, and an Article 4 direction can take the rights away anywhere.
Planning brings building regs with it
"Building Regulations should be assumed to apply to every deck structure requiring planning permission," says the Planning Portal. Approved Document K asks for guarding in a home wherever someone could fall more than 600mm. It doesn't name decks, but it sets 1100mm for an external balcony and 900mm for stairs and landings, and where under-fives use it, no gap a 100mm ball can pass. MyJobQuote prices the balustrade at £300 to £900 installed.
A balcony on flats is a fire question
Regulation 7(2) of the Building Regulations covers any building with flats and a storey 18 metres or more above the ground. Materials that become part of a balcony on it have to be class A2-s1, d0 or A1, and the government's 2022 circular says Approved Document B now carries balcony provisions where a storey is more than 11 metres up. Get the board's fire class from the maker before you price a balcony on a block of flats.
Two more from MyJobQuote's guides belong on the quote: keep the finished deck at least 150mm below the damp-proof course, and keep manholes and inspection chambers reachable. A MyBuilder lead said it straight out: "One manhole needs to be accessible".
Where the lead came from
Checking where a lead came from is your job, not the seller's.
The Information Commissioner's Office puts the checking on whoever uses bought marketing data. It expects checks that fit the risk, and a sales pitch from the seller doesn't meet them. Permission to text or email the customer only counts if it names your firm. In November 2025 the ICO fined Lead Pronto, which sells decking inside its landscaping leads, £30,000 over texts sent on consent that named none of the 18 businesses it was generating data for. Other home improvement fines are set out in the roofing guide.
Before paying for decking leads, ask the seller:
- Which website did the homeowner fill in?
- Is my business named in the consent?
- How many other installers get this lead?
- Is there an old deck to come out?
- How high off the ground will it sit?
File the answers with the lead itself, so the checks exist on paper if anyone asks how you came by the number.
Which way to go
Pay for the deck, not the patch, and spend it in spring.
Buy per lead if
- Most of your work is full decks
- The seller shows the size up front
- You ring back inside the hour
- Exclusivity is in the contract
Think twice if
- It is a repair or a few boards
- Five installers got the same lead
- A weekly fee runs through winter
- The seller sells it as landscaping
Run your own if
- You want the spring rush to yourself
- You fit composite, not quick patches
- You want the call to yourself
- You want the account if you leave
Old decks that only need a clean are a different job, covered in our pressure washing leads guide, and the same decision across every trade is in our guide to trade leads.
Our sources
Where these figures come from.
Read this knowing what we sell: a trade's website, plus the Google Ads that feed it. So this guide says plainly where a bought decking lead comes in cheaper than your own ads, and lets each seller speak in its own words.
Every seller quote above was copied from that seller's own site, on 2 October 2026. Search volumes and click prices come from UK Google Ads keyword data pulled 2 October 2026, the four-year series included. Job prices are from MyJobQuote's timber, composite and garden decking guides. The planning rules come from the General Permitted Development Order 2015, the government's technical guidance and the Planning Portal, guarding from Approved Document K, the balcony rule from legislation.gov.uk and the 2022 circular, and timber treatment from the FMB. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland set their own planning rules.
Questions decking installers ask
Decking leads, answered.
- How much do decking leads cost in the UK?
- Leads Do Work lists a decking lead at £25 plus VAT and adds an £11 weekly fee. Lead Pronto sells decking inside its landscaping leads from £15 a lead, as a guide price. Bark credits cost £1.80 each plus VAT, and Zapo, which used to be Get Work, sells landscaping search ads from £400 to £1,600 a month plus VAT. Buying the click yourself on a search for a decking installer costs £2.60 to £10.04 in Google Ads.
- Is a decking lead worth buying for a repair?
- Rarely. Won at one in 3, Leads Do Work's £25 lead costs £75 per customer, which is 23% of a typical £330 repair. The same £75 is 2% of a 40 square metre composite deck. The lead costs the same either way, so it pays on the big decks and struggles on the small fixes.
- Are decking leads shared with other installers?
- Mostly. Leads Do Work says 1 to 3 others usually compete for a job, never more than 5. MyJobQuote lets up to 3 installers quote and Bark up to 5, while MyBuilder lets any number respond. Zapo says its landscaping leads are exclusive to your business, and Lead Pronto agrees how its leads are shared before it starts.
- Is demand for decking falling?
- UK searches for "decking" have fallen three years running, from about 456,700 in the year to August 2023 to about 259,000 in the year to August 2026, down 43%. Searches for "decking companies near me" are down 38% over the same years. Searches for "decking repair near me" went the other way, up 10%.
- What is the 30cm rule for decking?
- In England, a garden deck is permitted development as long as it is no more than 30cm above the ground. The 2015 order defines a raised platform as one higher than 0.3 metres, and a raised platform needs planning permission. The deck must also keep, with other outbuildings and extensions, to 50% of the garden, and stay behind the front wall of the house. Flats, maisonettes and listed buildings don't get these rights.
- Does a raised deck need building regulations?
- The Planning Portal says building regulations should be assumed to apply to every deck that needs planning permission. Approved Document K asks for guarding in a home wherever someone could fall more than 600mm. MyJobQuote's guide puts a balustrade at £300 to £900 installed.
- Can you fit decking on a balcony of a block of flats?
- Only in a material with the right fire class. On a block with flats and a storey 18 metres or more above the ground, Regulation 7(2) of the Building Regulations requires materials that become part of a balcony to be class A2-s1, d0 or A1, and since 2022 Approved Document B carries balcony provisions where a storey is more than 11 metres up. Get the board's fire class from the maker before you quote.
- When is the busy season for decking?
- Spring. UK searches for "decking companies near me" peaked in March, April and May 2026 at 720 a month and bottomed out in November at 140, about 5.1 times lower.
- Is it legal to buy decking leads?
- Yes, but the checks are yours. The ICO expects a business using bought marketing data to check it in proportion to the risk, and says the seller's assurances don't settle it. A text or email also needs consent that names you.
Keep reading
More straight answers for trades.
Full decks booked in for spring, and the calls coming to you.
We build your website and run Google Ads in an account in your own name, aimed at the people asking for an installer rather than a pack of boards, with the budget turned up when spring comes round. See what it costs, then tell us about your patch and the decks you want more of, and we'll point the ads at them.