Last updated 25 September 2026
The lead never says whether they want you back next fortnight.
Leads Do Work sells garden maintenance leads at £8 each plus VAT, with a £11 weekly fee on top. Zapo, which used to trade as Get Work, starts its managed search ads at £400 a month plus VAT, roughly £40 for each lead on its own forecast. A homeowner's click on a gardening search, bought straight from Google, costs £2.61 to £5.00.
Every one of those prices is per lead, and a lead is one visit. A garden customer who keeps you on is a season of visits. Whether a lead pays comes down to which of the two you've bought, and the lead itself rarely tells you.
A real lead, word for word
"Lawn mowed once a fortnight"
That's one of the ten latest gardener leads on Leads Do Work's public feed on 24 September 2026, and the only one that asked for a regular visit in so many words. The other nine were a hedge trim and disposal, some edging, a concrete path, a shrub cut-back and the like. What each one is worth.
Where we stand
We don't sell gardening leads. We help you get your own.
This guide is the honest version of what buying gardening leads costs, and who else gets them. What we do instead is build gardeners 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
Sold as one visit, worth a whole season if they keep you on.
Checkatrade puts a gardener at £30 an hour on average, and says a general tidy takes one to two hours. The RHS says a lawn is usually mown weekly or fortnightly from March to October. So the same customer is worth £30 as a one-off and £510 as a fortnightly round. Here is what a lead costs you per customer won at each end, at one win in 3.
| Work | Typical UK price | Leads Do Work, £8 a lead | Zapo, about £40 a lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| A one-hour lawn cut | £30 | £24 a win, 80% of it | £120 a win, 400% of it |
| A general tidy, one to two hours | £30 to £60 | £24 a win, 53% of it | £120 a win, 267% of it |
| Clear an overgrown garden | £70 to £300 | £24 a win, 13% of it | £120 a win, 65% of it |
| A gardener's day | £120 to £320 | £24 a win, 11% of it | £120 a win, 55% of it |
| A season of fortnightly cuts (17) | £510 | £24 a win, 5% of it | £120 a win, 24% of it |
| A season of weekly cuts (35) | £1,050 | £24 a win, 2% of it | £120 a win, 11% of it |
Prices from Checkatrade's garden maintenance, grass cutting and clearance cost guides (April to June 2026), each worked at the middle of its range. The two season rows are our sum: 17 or 35 cuts between March and October at £30 each. One win in 3 is MyJobQuote's figure for its trades. Both lead prices exclude VAT; the Zapo figure splits its starting plan evenly over its forecast leads.
A won customer should cost about 10 to 15 percent of what the work is worth. Bought for a single cut, even the £8 lead eats 80% of it, and Zapo's costs 4 times the cut. Kept for a fortnightly season, the £8 lead drops to 5%, and a weekly customer carries even Zapo's at 11%. The lead price hardly moves. What moves is whether the customer stays.
If you're building a round
Ask on the first call whether they want a regular visit, and price the season, not the cut. A seller can't tell you which leads will turn into rounds, so you pay the same for the one-off tidy as for the customer who stays eight months.
If clearances fill your diary
An overgrown garden at £70 to £300 carries a bought lead better than a single cut, but it ends when the skip bags do. Patios work differently again, and our landscaping leads guide covers those builds, while fences have a guide of their own.
Your numbers
Price the customer, then see what a lead can cost.
Pick a single cut or a season, or type in what a year of one of your customers is really worth. Set how many quotes it takes you to win one, then add a seller's price per lead.
WHAT CAN YOU PAY FOR A GARDENING 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
£26
a lead, winning one in 3
- Healthy range, per won job
- £51 to £77
- Which per lead is
- £17 to £26
Put a seller's price in the last box and this will tell you what each won job would cost you.
Treat the 10 to 15 percent band as a rule of thumb rather than a measurement. And a season only counts if the customer stays for it.
Who sells them
Eight places selling gardening leads, and who else hears about each.
Every row below comes from what the seller publishes itself, on a gardening page, a price list or its terms. Three of them sell to gardeners through a page written for landscapers, which tells you who they had in mind.
| Seller | Price | Who else gets the lead | In their words |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leads Do Work | £8 + VAT a maintenance lead, £11 a week | 1 to 3 others, never over 5 | "sent to Connect accounts first" |
| MyBuilder | A fee when the homeowner shortlists you | Whoever the homeowner picks | "Respond to as many leads as you like" |
| MyJobQuote | Not published, first month free | Up to 3 tradesmen | "You only pay for the gardening jobs that you want" |
| Bark | Credits at £1.80 + VAT each | Up to 5 professionals | "£1.80 per credit" |
| Leads Everyday | Not published | Nobody | "never shared with competitors" |
| Landscapers Directory | £97 + VAT a month per website | Nobody, until you stop | "sold to one landscaper only" |
| TradesGrow | £1,200 a month, most of it Meta ads | Nobody | "not resold to a list of competing trades" |
| Get Work (now Zapo) | £400 to £1,600 + VAT a month | Nobody | "exclusive to your business" |
Leads Do Work: the cheapest lead, and a fee that runs all year
Its Connect price list charges £8 plus VAT for a "Garden | Maintenance & Upkeep" lead, the lowest per-lead gardening price we found published anywhere. It adds "a small weekly service fee of £11.00". Kept on for a year, that fee alone is £572 plus VAT, more than a fortnightly customer's whole season of cuts at £510.
Its terms say "Customers compete with 1 to 3 tradesmen for the same work, with no more than 5 competing for any given job." Connect accounts get the lead first, and "Jobs are not guaranteed, so customers must respond quickly." The leads come from what it calls "a network of nearly 300 different home improvement websites and blogs".
MyBuilder's sample lead is a waste job
You can respond to as many gardening leads as you like, and MyBuilder charges when a homeowner shortlists you, win or lose; more in is MyBuilder worth it. One of the sample leads on its own gardener sign-up page reads "I have trimmed the hedges back and need somebody to take them away and dispose of them." That's a job with no gardening in it, and it comes with a legal check the customer has to make on you, set out below.
Landscapers Directory: exclusive while you pay, then passed on
For £97 plus VAT a month it builds a website for one service in one town, and lists "regular maintenance contracts" among the work it covers. Each site is "sold to one landscaper only", with 30 days' notice to cancel. Its own FAQ says what happens then: "We will then pass the site, and the leads it generates to another landscape contractor in the same location." The customers who found you through it now find a rival.
Managed ads start at a price a round can't carry
TradesGrow's cheapest plan is £1,200 a month, including a £200 management fee, for an estimated 30-plus leads from Meta ads, with the first 7 free. Zapo has no gardening page at all; it sells to landscape gardeners from its landscaping page, starting at £400 a month plus VAT, £200 of it ad budget, for 10 forecast leads. Leads Everyday promises "Targeted Google Ads" and leads "never shared with competitors", while the steps on the same page say "We build targeted lists and craft compelling outreach." It names "regular garden maintenance packages" and publishes no price.
MyJobQuote and Bark: shared by design
MyJobQuote gives you the first month free and lets up to 3 tradesmen take each lead. Bark hasn't moved gardeners onto its subscription marketplace, so you still buy credits at £1.80 each plus VAT, and up to 5 professionals can answer the same garden. Bark tells those homeowners that routine garden maintenance "typically costs around £25 to £45 per hour", so the customer arrives with a price in mind. What several gardeners chasing one lawn does to yours is in the shared-lead trap.
Everything here about Leads Do Work's contract comes from its own published terms and conditions, last read on 24 September 2026. Terms get revised, so check yours against the current version before you act on anything.
Rather have gardening 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 gardening customers straight to you, in an ad account in your name that stays yours if you ever leave.
See pricingBuying the click yourself
Reaching a gardener costs sellers 12 times what a homeowner costs you.
"gardening leads", the search a gardener makes to find a seller, costs £32.68 a click. A homeowner typing "gardener near me", the trade's biggest search at 22,200 a month, costs £2.78, so the seller pays roughly 12 times as much to reach you. The homeowner searches run from £2.61 for "garden maintenance near me" to £5.00 for "lawn care services". Clicks are turned into leads here with WordStream's 7.33% conversion rate for home improvement search ads. That rate was measured in America, so read the per-lead column as a ballpark.
| Search | Searches a month | Per click | Per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| lawn care services | 1,000 | £5.00 | £68 |
| lawn care near me | 1,600 | £4.46 | £61 |
| lawn mowing service | 590 | £4.31 | £59 |
| grass cutting service | 880 | £4.03 | £55 |
| hedge trimming near me | 880 | £3.37 | £46 |
| grass cutting services near me | 5,400 | £3.28 | £45 |
| garden clearance near me | 3,600 | £3.20 | £44 |
| hedge cutting service | 1,000 | £3.17 | £43 |
| garden waste removal | 2,900 | £2.92 | £40 |
| gardening services near me | 9,900 | £2.88 | £39 |
| gardener near me | 22,200 | £2.78 | £38 |
| garden maintenance near me | 3,600 | £2.61 | £36 |
UK Google Ads data, pulled 24 September 2026. The click prices come from bids, and plenty of advertisers pay less.
At £36 to £68 a lead, your own ads cost more per lead than Leads Do Work's £8 and about the same as Zapo's £40. On a single cut, neither sum works. On a round, what matters is who the lead is and who else rang them:
- Write the ad for regular visits
- Put the budget into March
- Say you carry your own green waste
- The call comes to you alone
- Pay Google direct, no markup
- The account stays yours
An ad that says "fortnightly lawn care" screens out some of the one-off tidies before you pay for the click, and a form that asks "how often?" tells you which kind of customer you've got before you drive round. To size the spend across the year, see how much to spend on Google Ads.
Google Local Services Ads
Google lists "Lawn care services" as a UK Local Services Ads category. Google checks the business first, then charges for each call you answer, and UK advertisers can't claim lead credits back. Screening, opening hours and call charges are covered in our Local Services Ads guide.
Before you load the van
Whose clippings they are decides what you need to carry them.
In England, a business that transports waste must register with the Environment Agency, and gov.uk says you can get an unlimited fine if you don't. Registration is usually free if you only carry waste you produce yourself, and costs £191.02 otherwise. When you register you're told whether you're upper or lower tier, and an upper tier registration is renewed every 3 years at £130.25.
Which one you need depends on whose waste it is. The government's guidance to councils says a tradesperson working on a property is responsible for the waste they produce, so your own cuttings are yours. The hedge the customer trimmed last weekend is different. That's their household waste, and gov.uk tells them to check anyone taking it away is on the register as upper tier. If it turns up fly-tipped and they didn't check, the council can fine them, £200 by default and up to £600.
The disposal lead
"Take them away and dispose of them" is a waste job before it's a gardening one. Put your registration number on your website and your quotes, because a careful customer is told to look it up. The guidance lists a receipt with a registered carrier's details as the kind of record that protects them.
The hedge with a nest in it
Under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, damaging or destroying a nest on purpose "while that nest is in use or being built" is a crime. Hedges and bushes are named in the wild birds guidance, and each nest can mean an unlimited fine and six months inside.
The weedkiller in the van
A self-employed gardener spraying for work is a professional user. The regulations say a product authorised for professional use needs a specified certificate or supervision, and HSE says grandfather rights ended in November 2015. Garden-centre products are allowed too, but HSE expects training and a risk assessment.
One more for clearance leads. gov.uk says Japanese knotweed may count as controlled waste, you can be prosecuted for causing it to spread into the wild, and off site it needs a registered carrier and an authorised landfill or disposal site. None of the leads on the two feeds we read mentioned knotweed. A photo request on your own website's form can. And if you start carrying other people's rubbish as a line of work, the paperwork grows; our waste removal leads guide covers it.
Through the year
The mowing round is decided in March, and hedges peak with the nests.
Leads Do Work says homeowners look for gardeners "especially during spring and summer". The searches agree, and they're more precise. Searches for "gardener near me" held at their peak through March, April, May and June and bottomed out in December, about 6.1 times lower.
UK searches for "gardener near me", by month
September 2025 to August 2026. Google Ads keyword data, rounded bands.
Grass cutting peaks at the start of the season
"grass cutting services near me" hit 14,800 a month in March and was down to 1,900 by August. People pick who cuts their lawn for the year in the first weeks of spring. A round that isn't full by April is hard to fill later.
Hedge searches peak in nesting months
"hedge cutting near me" peaked at 4,400 a month in June and July and fell to 590 in December. gov.uk's advice is to time hedge work to avoid the breeding season, so the busiest hedge month is also the one most likely to hold a job you have to put back.
Signing up the season
One cut falls under the £42 line. A whole season doesn't.
The Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 give a customer 14 days to cancel a contract agreed at their home, but that part of the Regulations doesn't apply where the customer pays £42 or less. A single £30 cut agreed in the garden sits under it. Agree a season of fortnightly visits at £510 on the same doorstep and you're well over it.
So the moment a lead turns into a round is the moment the paperwork changes. Put the cancellation notice on the season agreement, and if they want you to start this week, get that request in writing.
How fast to ring a bought lead back, with the research behind it, is in our roofing leads guide. When the first gardener to call can end up with the whole year, it matters more than the price.
Where the lead came from
The checks on a bought lead are yours to make, not theirs.
According to the Information Commissioner's Office, a business that buys marketing data has to run its own proportionate checks, and a seller's word doesn't count as one. For texts and emails, the customer's consent has to name your business. The research behind our landscaping guide found no ICO fine naming a gardening business, and the wider home improvement cases are in the roofing guide.
Before paying for gardening leads, ask the seller:
- Which website did this come from?
- Does the consent name my business?
- How many others were sent it?
- Did they ask for regular visits?
- Is there waste to take away?
Write the answers down against each lead you buy. Should the ICO ever ask, your notes are evidence and the seller's brochure isn't.
Which way to go
Buy the round, not the visit, and know who else is calling.
Buy per lead if
- You have room on the round
- The lead is cheap and local
- You call back within minutes
- You can take the waste legally
Think twice if
- It is one cut or one tidy
- Five others got the same lead
- A weekly fee runs all winter
- The contract stops in winter too
Run your own if
- You want regular customers
- You want to spend in March
- You want the call alone
- Your account, kept if you leave
Plenty of gardeners use a few cheap leads in March to top up a round and let word of mouth carry the rest. Tree felling and big reductions are a different trade with their own rules, set out in our tree surgeon leads guide, and the same choice across every trade is in our guide to trade leads.
Our sources
Where these figures come from.
We aren't neutral: we build websites and run Google Ads for trades. That's why this guide shows where a bought gardening lead beats your own ads on price, and quotes each seller in its own words.
Seller pages, price lists and terms were read on 24 September 2026. Click prices and search volumes are Google Ads data for the UK, pulled 24 September 2026. Job prices are from Checkatrade and the mowing months from the RHS. The waste rules come from gov.uk and Defra's guidance to councils, the nesting rules from the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 and Natural England, and the weedkiller rules from legislation.gov.uk and HSE. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their own waste registers and rules; the waste and knotweed guidance here is England's.
Questions gardeners ask
Gardening leads, answered.
- How much do gardening leads cost in the UK?
- Leads Do Work charges £8 plus VAT for a garden maintenance lead on its Connect plan, with a £11 weekly fee on top. Bark sells credits at £1.80 each plus VAT. Zapo, formerly Get Work, runs search ads from £400 to £1,600 a month plus VAT, and TradesGrow's cheapest plan is £1,200 a month including the ad spend. A homeowner's click on a gardening search costs £2.61 to £5.00 in Google Ads.
- Is a gardening lead worth buying for a single grass cut?
- Rarely on its own. At one win in 3, even Leads Do Work's £8 lead costs £24 per customer won, which is 80% of a £30 cut. If that customer books fortnightly cuts from March to October, the same £24 is about 5% of the season. The lead pays when it becomes a regular visit.
- Are gardening leads shared with other gardeners?
- Usually. Leads Do Work says its customers compete with 1 to 3 others for a job and never more than 5. MyJobQuote lets up to 3 tradesmen take each lead, Bark up to 5 professionals, and MyBuilder lets you respond to as many as you like. Leads Everyday, TradesGrow and Zapo say theirs are not shared.
- Do I need a waste carrier licence to take garden waste away?
- In England you must register as a waste carrier if your business transports waste, and you can get an unlimited fine if you don't. Registration is usually free if you only carry waste you produce yourself, such as your own cuttings, and costs £191.02 otherwise. A pile of clippings the customer cut before you arrived is their household waste, and gov.uk tells them to check you are registered as upper tier before they hand it over.
- Can I cut a customer's hedge in spring and summer?
- Yes, as long as you don't intentionally take, damage or destroy a wild bird's nest that is in use or being built. Section 1 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 makes that an offence, with an unlimited fine and up to 6 months in prison for each one, according to gov.uk. Look through the hedge first, and if birds are sitting on a nest, rebook the cut.
- Do I need a certificate to use weedkiller in a customer's garden?
- For a product authorised for professional use, yes: the law says nobody may use one without a specified certificate unless they work under supervision, and grandfather rights ended in November 2015. HSE says a self-employed gardener can use a home garden product for work too, but should be trained and carry out a risk assessment.
- When do people look for a gardener most?
- UK searches for "gardener near me" were highest in March, April, May and June and lowest in December, about 6.1 times quieter. Searches for grass cutting peak earlier, in March, and hedge cutting searches peak in June and July.
- Is it legal to buy gardening leads?
- Yes, if you check where the lead came from. The ICO expects a business buying marketing data to carry out proportionate checks and not rely on the seller's assurances, and for texts and emails the consent has to name your business.
Keep reading
More straight answers for trades.
A round full by April, and every customer on it found you first.
We build your website and run Google Ads in an account in your own name, aimed at the regular lawn and garden customers you want rather than every one-off tidy in the area. See what it costs, then tell us about your round and the gaps in it, and we'll aim the ads at filling them.