Last updated 15 October 2026
£99 a week for pupils, or £2.00 a click to find your own.
The big driving schools hand pupils to their instructors through a franchise, and the weekly fee is the price of them. RED charges £99 a week if you bring your own car. BSM's packages with a car run from £181 to £201 a week. Rated Driving and EzLicence take nothing upfront and are paid out of the lessons instead. Zapo, which used to trade as Get Work, will advertise you to learners from £400 a month plus VAT; divide that by its own lead forecast and each one costs about £40.
Buy the click yourself and a learner searching "driving instructor near me" costs £2.00 a tap. That search runs at 40,500 a month in the UK. Running an MOT garage rather than a dual-control car? That's garage leads for car garages.
From BSM's own franchise table
"Pupil introduction | Yes, no fee | No"
BSM's Partner package includes pupil introductions and costs from £201 a week. Its Solo package has the same brand new car and no introductions, from £181. The £20 a week between them is the one published price for pupil supply we could find, and over the 24-month contract it adds up to £2,080.
Where we stand
We don't sell driving instructor leads. We help you get your own.
This guide is the honest version of what buying driving instructor leads costs, and who else gets them. What we do instead is build driving instructors 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.
What you are buying
You're buying a learner, not a lesson. Price the lead against the pass.
A roofer's lead is one job. Yours is a person who will sit in your car for weeks. Rated Driving prices a lesson at £35 to £50 an hour and its intensive courses from £650 for 10 hours to £2,250 for 45, and it says complete beginners "typically start from 30 hours". At its hourly rates, 30 hours is £1,050 to £1,500.
Here is what each kind of learner costs to win, at Zapo's forecast and at the price of your own ad on "driving instructor near me", if one lead in 3 books.
| Learner | What they pay | Zapo, about £40 a lead | Your own ad, about £27 a lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| One hour, pay as you go | £35 to £50 | £120 a win, 279% of it | £82 a win, 191% of it |
| Intensive course, 10 hours | £650 | £120 a win, 18% of it | £82 a win, 13% of it |
| A beginner at 30 hours | £1,050 to £1,500 | £120 a win, 9% of it | £82 a win, 6% of it |
| Intensive course, 45 hours | £2,250 | £120 a win, 5% of it | £82 a win, 4% of it |
Learner prices are Rated Driving's own published lesson and course prices (October 2026); the 30-hour row is its hourly range times 30. Ranges are worked at their middle. Winning one in 3 is MyJobQuote's figure for its own trades, not a driving figure; nobody publishes one for instructors. A Zapo lead in the table is simply £400 split 10 ways, using Zapo's own forecast, and before VAT.
Our rough rule is that winning a job should cost about 10 to 15 percent of what it brings in. A learner who stays for 30 hours puts a Zapo lead under it, at 9%. A pupil who takes one lesson and disappears costs 279% of what they paid you.
If they only want a refresher
A full licence holder after two hours of confidence on the motorway is a short job. Paying per lead for that work rarely adds up, because the lead price is set for a learner who will stay.
If they want a one-week course
A £650 course is a big ticket in a single week, and it fills your diary in a block. Rated Driving takes a £250 deposit to hold the dates, which is worth copying if you sell courses yourself.
Your numbers
What can you pay for a learner before the hours stop covering it?
Start from the beginner at 30 hours, which is where most of your income sits. Put in how many enquiries turn into a booked pupil for you, then a supplier's price per lead. Try the single lesson after it and watch the same lead price swallow the whole hour.
WHAT CAN YOU PAY FOR A DRIVING INSTRUCTOR 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
£64
a lead, winning one in 3
- Healthy range, per won job
- £128 to £191
- Which per lead is
- £43 to £64
Put a seller's price in the last box and this will tell you what each won job would cost you.
That 10 to 15 percent band is a rule of thumb we use across every trade. Nobody has measured it for driving lessons.
Who supplies pupils
Franchises charge by the week. The apps take their share from the lesson.
Seller pages and prices are quoted from each firm's own website, and "Not stated" means the firm doesn't say. The usual pay-per-lead sellers for trades, Leads Do Work, Lead Pronto and PromoSEO, had no driving instructor offer when we looked.
| Supplier | How you pay | Tie-in | In their words |
|---|---|---|---|
| RED | £99 a week, own car; from £250 with theirs | 12-month contract | "Pre-paid students to your diary" |
| BSM | From £201 a week with pupils, £181 without | 24 months, 12 weeks' notice | "Pupil introduction | Yes, no fee" |
| The AA | A weekly fee, not printed | Not stated | "no cap on the number we can send you" |
| Rated Driving | Out of the lesson price | None | "show you how much you will be paid" |
| EzLicence | A match fee, not printed | None | "Zero cost to you unless a lesson actually completes" |
| Zapo (formerly Get Work) | From £400 + VAT a month | Month to month | "exclusive leads to driving schools" |
| Leads Everyday | A monthly fee, not printed | Cancel anytime | "never shared with competitors" |
RED's £99 is nearly three lessons a week
RED's Brand Franchise lets you keep your own car and costs £99 a week, which RED says buys "Pre-paid students to your diary" along with the brand and its support team. Its Full Franchise adds a RED car from £250. Both sit on a 12-month contract, and admin fees are non-refundable.
RED puts its instructors' average rate at £37 an hour, so £99 is about 2.7 lessons a week before you earn anything, or £5,148 over a year before any franchise-free weeks. Against the 30 hours a week its instructors work on average, that is about 9% of the week. RED learners also pay a £1.80 an hour Digital Charge and a £3.49 booking fee on its introductory package, on top of what you teach.
BSM and the AA bundle pupils in with the car
BSM's two packages both include a brand new tuition car, breakdown cover and insurance. The Partner package adds pupil introductions, BSM livery, professional indemnity and the diary app for £20 a week more. Both carry a £180 admin fee, a £170 deposit and 12 weeks' notice before the end of the 24-month term. The AA runs the same split: its All-inclusive franchise promises pupil enquiries with "no cap", and its Solo package supplies an unbranded car for "one fixed weekly fee". The AA doesn't print that fee on its franchise page.
Rated Driving and EzLicence cost nothing until a lesson happens
Rated Driving says there are "no joining fees, weekly fees, contracts or minimum commitments". It sends a job to your app with what you will be paid, and you accept or turn it down. Its learners pay it £35 to £50 an hour, so the gap between that and your figure is its share. Accept a learner and "all activity (including payments and scheduling)" stays in its app. About 40% of its instructors are also in a franchise, RED and the AA included. EzLicence charges "A match fee" only once a lesson completes, takes the learner's money at booking and pays you every 7, 14 or 28 days. Neither prints its cut.
Zapo and Leads Everyday advertise for pupils on your behalf
Zapo asks "Need pupils for your driving school?" and sends "exclusive leads to driving schools, driving instructors and trainers" from search ads, starting "within the next 14 days". Its cheapest plan is £400, and £200 of that buys the actual clicks. Leads Everyday builds a landing page, runs Google Ads, takes "No commission on any bookings" and prints no price. Both are bidding on the same searches you can bid on yourself. Fast Pass, a driving school, sells growth packages including "Lead generation systems" to other instructors, also unpriced. How sharing a customer with rival firms plays out in other trades is in the shared-lead trap.
Everything here about RED's contract comes from its own published terms and conditions, last read on 1 October 2026. Terms get revised, so check yours against the current version before you act on anything.
Rather have driving instructor 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
Franchises pay £6.69 a click to recruit you. A learner's click costs a third.
"driving instructor leads", the search an instructor would type to find a supplier, showed no searches and no bids at all. The franchises bid on a different search: "driving instructor franchise" costs £6.69 a click across 170 a month, about 3.3 times what a learner's "driving instructor near me" costs. Recruiting you is worth more to them per click than a pupil is. Learner clicks run from £1.12 to £2.82. For the per-lead column we assume 7.33% of clicks get in touch, which is WordStream's conversion rate for home improvement search ads. It is US data, so treat it as a rough guide.
| Search | Searches a month | Per click | Per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| intensive driving course | 27,100 | £2.82 | £38 |
| one week intensive driving course | 210 | £2.74 | £37 |
| driving instructor | 18,100 | £2.67 | £36 |
| intensive driving courses near me | 8,100 | £2.60 | £35 |
| driving instructor near me | 40,500 | £2.00 | £27 |
| driving lessons | 27,100 | £1.90 | £26 |
| automatic driving instructor near me | 4,400 | £1.86 | £25 |
| refresher driving lessons | 1,600 | £1.84 | £25 |
| driving lessons near me | 18,100 | £1.81 | £25 |
| driving school near me | 33,100 | £1.71 | £23 |
| automatic driving lessons near me | 8,100 | £1.70 | £23 |
| female driving instructor near me | 2,400 | £1.56 | £21 |
| crash course driving | 9,900 | £1.55 | £21 |
| block booking driving lessons | 590 | £1.24 | £17 |
| motorway driving lessons | 720 | £1.13 | £15 |
| pass plus course | 1,300 | £1.12 | £15 |
Google Ads data for the UK, pulled 1 October 2026. Click prices are bid estimates from Google's keyword data, so what you actually pay will land near them rather than on them.
The dearest learner search is "intensive driving course" at £2.82, about £38 a lead, and it is also the one attached to the biggest ticket: a course worth £650 or more. "female driving instructor near me" (2,400 a month) and "automatic driving instructor near me" (4,400) are narrower searches that let you pay only for the work you want. "motorway driving lessons" is £1.13, and only an ADI in a dual-control car is allowed to take a learner on one.
Every learner search works out cheaper per lead than Zapo's forecast. What running your own ads changes:
- Pick automatic, female or intensive work
- Your name on the ad, not a franchise brand
- The learner pays you, not an app
- No weekly fee in the quiet weeks
- Clicks billed by Google at cost
- The ad account stays yours if you go
Setting a budget is covered in how much to spend on Google Ads, and what an account involves from day one in our guide to Google Ads for small firms. One free listing is worth having first: the DVSA find a driving instructor service. ADIs choose whether to appear on it, and a listed instructor can show their standards check grade if they declare it.
Who can be paid to teach
A pink badge can teach for money, but it can't advertise as you.
gov.uk is plain about it: anyone a learner pays to teach them "must be either" an approved driving instructor or a trainee. ADIs show a green badge in the windscreen and trainees a pink one, and DVSA takes reports about anyone charging without either. Prices are yours to set: "there's no minimum or maximum cost".
The trainee licence is where buying leads stops. It costs £140, lasts 6 months, and lets a trainee charge for lessons. But DVSA's trainee licence rules tie the trainee to the training establishment named on the licence, "so you cannot work independently, such as by setting up your own school".
How a trainee must advertise
As a "trainee driving instructor", naming the training establishment, and giving only its contact details. A lead with a trainee's own mobile on it breaks that.
What the green badge costs you
£300 for the first ADI certificate and £300 again to renew every 4 years. Every route in this guide, own ads included, assumes you hold one.
What keeps you on the register
A standards check, usually every 4 years. Fail three times and you are removed from the ADI register, along with every pupil you paid to find.
So for a trainee, the franchise or school is the only legal place pupils can come from, and RED, for one, takes trainees on as franchisees while they train. Buying your own leads, through Zapo, Leads Everyday or your own ads, opens up once the green badge arrives.
Blocks and courses sold online
A block booked online can be cancelled for 14 days. Lessons already given still get paid.
Sell a 30-hour block or an intensive course through your website or over the phone and the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 give the learner 14 days to change their mind. Under regulation 36 you must not start lessons inside that time unless they have made "an express request". If they did and then cancel, they pay "in proportion to what has been supplied".
- Get the request to start in writing
- Give the 14-day cancellation details
- Refund the hours not yet taught
- No cancellation details: no charge at all
The last point is the expensive one. Skip the cancellation information and the learner "bears no cost" for the lessons in that period, even the ones you gave. Rated Driving promises an instructor within 14 days of booking a course, so lessons can easily start inside the cancellation period. Put the wording in every booking confirmation.
Through the year
Learners look hardest in September and January, and least at Christmas.
UK searches for "driving instructor near me" reached 49,500 in September and January, fell to 27,100 in December, and sat at 33,100 right through the summer. Busiest to quietest is about 1.8 times.
UK searches for "driving instructor near me", by month
September 2025 to August 2026. Google Ads keyword data, rounded bands.
Spend in September and in January
Both peaks sit at the start of a term and the start of a year. Those are the months a budget reaches the most learners, and the worst months to take a week off.
August held level in this data
Searches for an instructor didn't drop over the summer holidays. That is searching, not lessons booked, so a quiet diary in August may be your existing pupils going away rather than new ones vanishing.
Which way to go
Take a franchise to start. Once the diary is full, stop paying for the pupils.
Franchise if
- You hold a pink badge
- You need a dual-control car
- Your diary is still empty
- You want prepaid pupils
Think twice if
- £99 a week buys pupils you skip
- The contract runs 24 months
- The app keeps the payments
- Nobody prints their cut
Run your own if
- You hold a green badge
- You teach automatic or courses
- You want the learner to pay you
- The ad account is yours to keep
A franchise fee keeps running whether the pupils came from the franchise or from your own name in the village. Once the diary is full, referrals and a few well-aimed ads can do the job the weekly fee was paying for. How lead buying works in the trades is in our guide to trade leads, and how mobile car work is sold is in our mobile mechanic leads guide. Other one-to-one teaching is covered in private tutor leads and personal trainer leads.
Our sources
Where every driving instructor figure here came from.
We build websites and run Google Ads, so we have an interest in you choosing your own ads. That's why each supplier is quoted in its own words, and why the franchise tables are BSM's and RED's own rather than our summary.
We read each supplier's instructor pages on 1 October 2026, and pulled the UK search and click data from Google Ads the same day. Learner prices come from Rated Driving's lesson and intensive course pages. The DVSA rules are from gov.uk on driving lessons, trainee licences, ADI fees and the standards check, and cancellation from the Consumer Contracts Regulations.
Questions driving instructors ask
Driving instructor leads, answered.
- How much do driving instructor leads cost in the UK?
- Zapo, formerly Get Work, charges from £400 a month plus VAT to run search ads for an instructor, and forecasts 10 leads on that plan, about £40 each. Franchises charge by the week instead: RED's Brand Franchise is £99 with your own car, and BSM's packages run from £181 to £201 with a car included. Rated Driving and EzLicence charge nothing upfront and are paid out of the lesson. A click on your own ad for "driving instructor near me" costs about £2.00.
- Is a driving school franchise worth it just for the pupils?
- BSM puts a price on it. Its Partner package, which includes pupil introductions, is from £201 a week, and its Solo package with the same new car and no pupils is from £181. That is £20 a week, or £2,080 over the 24-month contract, for introductions, branding, the app and indemnity. If you already have your own car and a full diary, you are paying for something you don't use.
- Can a trainee driving instructor buy leads or advertise?
- Not in their own name. DVSA says a trainee licence means you "cannot work independently", must describe yourself as a "trainee driving instructor", say which training establishment you work at, and give only its contact details. Your pupils come through that establishment.
- Are pupils from Rated Driving or EzLicence mine to keep?
- They pay through the platform. Rated Driving says that if you accept a learner from it, "all activity (including payments and scheduling) needs to happen via the Rated Driving app", and its app works only for the learners it sends you. EzLicence takes payment at booking and pays out on a 7, 14 or 28 days cycle. Neither page we read says what share of the lesson price it keeps.
- When do learners search for a driving instructor most?
- In the last 12 months, UK searches for "driving instructor near me" peaked in September and January at 49,500 and were lowest in December at 27,100, about 1.8 times apart. June to August held at 33,100.
- Can a learner cancel a block of lessons booked online?
- Yes, within 14 days of booking under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. If they asked you to start lessons inside that time, they pay for the hours already given and get the rest back. If you never gave them the cancellation information, they pay nothing for those hours.
- Do I have to be listed on the DVSA find an instructor service?
- No. gov.uk says ADIs "choose whether or not to be on this service, so not all ADIs will be listed", and a listed instructor can show their standards check grade if they declare it. It is the official place a learner can check you before they ring.
Keep reading
More straight answers for trades.
Learners who book whole courses with you, not with a franchise.
We build your website and run Google Ads from an account in your own name, aimed at the courses and long blocks that fill a diary rather than one-off refreshers. See what it costs, then tell us about your business and we'll build the campaign around the learners you want more of.