Last updated 15 October 2026
£14 a lead for a smart thermostat, and no price for anything much bigger.
Leads Do Work sells smart thermostat leads at £14 each plus VAT, and that is the only per-lead price we found for this trade in the UK. Zapo, formerly Get Work, runs search ads for smart home installers from £400 a month plus VAT, which its own forecast works out at roughly £40 a lead, and PromoSEO's packages start at £500 a month. Buy the click on Google yourself and it costs £1.28 to £20.68.
The jobs behind those leads run from a £175 home network to a £37,500 whole-home system, about 214 times apart. Only one seller prints a price per lead at all, and it stops at the thermostat.
Straight off a seller's price list
"Heating | Smart Thermostats £14.00"
That is the one smart home line on Leads Do Work's Connect price list. There is no row for lighting, audio, networks or whole-home systems, and none of its 64 public lead feeds is for smart home work. Win one thermostat quote in 3 and that £14 lead costs £42 a won job, 19% of a £224 supply-and-fit.
Where we stand
We don't sell smart home leads. We help you get your own.
This guide is the honest version of what buying smart home leads costs, and who else gets them. What we do instead is build smart home 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.
What you are buying
A lead can eat half a thermostat job and barely dent a whole-home smart system.
Smart home is several trades sharing one name. A heating engineer fitting a Hive, an electrician swapping switches for smart dimmers, a networking firm running cable to the loft and an integrator wiring a whole house to one app all count. Only 12% of UK adults say they have smart lighting, heating or hot water controls at home, against 40% with a smart speaker, by Ofcom's 2025 count.
Only the thermostat gets a Leads Do Work price, £14, so every other row is costed on Zapo's forecast alone, at one win in 3.
| Job | Typical UK price | Zapo, about £40 a lead | Leads Do Work, £14 a lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Design and fit a home network | £150 to £200 | £120 a win, 69% of the job | No row for this job |
| Smart thermostat, supply and fit | £174 to £274 | £120 a win, 54% of the job | £42 a win, 19% of the job |
| A smart lighting project | £100 to £1,200 | £120 a win, 18% of the job | No row for this job |
| A ceiling speaker system | £400 to £5,500 | £120 a win, 4% of the job | No row for this job |
| Smart lighting for the whole house | £3,000 to £10,000 | £120 a win, 2% of the job | No row for this job |
| Lighting, heating and alarm, one app | £5,000 to £15,000 | £120 a win, 1% of the job | No row for this job |
| Pro-installed single-platform system | £25,000 to £50,000 | £120 a win, 0.3% of the job | No row for this job |
Thermostat, ceiling speaker and whole-house lighting prices are from Checkatrade's guides (June and August 2026), the lighting project from MyBuilder's (August 2026). The home network and both whole-home rows are from Checkatrade guides last updated in May 2024. Checkatrade puts the whole-house lighting top at "£10,000+", shown here as £10,000. None of the guides says whether VAT is included. Ranges are worked at their middle. One win in 3 is MyJobQuote's figure for its trades; nobody publishes an independent UK figure. Divide £400 by 10 and you get the Zapo price per lead, the same for a thermostat as for a whole-home system. Lead prices are before VAT.
A won customer should cost about 10 to 15 percent of the job. On Zapo's forecast a home network job pays 69% of itself for the lead and a thermostat 54%. A smart lighting project sits just above the band at 18%, and from a ceiling speaker system up, at 4%, the lead is small change. Leads Do Work's £14 still takes 19% of a thermostat.
If it's a thermostat and nothing else
Checkatrade puts the fitting alone at £30 to £80. Most of a thermostat job is the box, so the margin is thin before a lead touches it. It pays when it turns into radiator valves, lighting or the boiler a year later, and only your own customer list keeps that next job.
If it's cameras or a doorbell
That market has its own sellers and its own privacy rules, covered in our CCTV installation leads guide. A new circuit, a consumer unit or a rewire is electrician work with its own prices, in electrician leads.
Your numbers
How much can a smart home lead cost before the job stops paying you?
The calculator opens on a smart lighting project. Flick it to the thermostat, then to the single-platform system, and watch the same lead price shrink from a big slice of the job to small change.
WHAT CAN YOU PAY FOR A SMART HOME 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
£33
a lead, winning one in 3
- Healthy range, per won job
- £65 to £98
- Which per lead is
- £22 to £33
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.
Who sells them
Two sellers have a smart home page. Neither prints a price per lead.
Below are the three firms that sell smart home leads and the directories that list smart home installers. Seller pages and prices are quoted from each firm's own website, and "Not stated" means the firm doesn't say. Lead Pronto, Leads Everyday, Leads 2 Trade, Geordie Leads and TextBadger Marketing have no smart home page at all.
| Seller | Price | Who else gets the lead | In their words |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leads Do Work | £14 a thermostat lead + VAT, £11 a week | 1 to 3 others, 5 at most | "Heating | Smart Thermostats" |
| Zapo (formerly Get Work) | £400 to £1,600 + VAT a month | Nobody | "exclusive leads to home automation companies" |
| PromoSEO | Packages from £500 a month | Nobody | "No leads are shared." |
| TrustATrader | Not published | Several traders | "multiple trusted traders" |
| FindaTradie | £395 a year listing | Not stated | "Free authentic leads" |
| Bark | Credits, no smart home price shown | Not stated | "Home Automation Experts near you" |
Leads Do Work sells thermostats and stops
Its Connect price list has "Heating | Smart Thermostats" at £14 from a homeowner and £16 from a business, plus VAT and an £11 weekly fee. A thermostat customer bought there also goes to 1 to 3 other heating or electrical firms, 5 at the outside. Returns are "manually reviewed", and contracts "can be canceled anytime".
There is no smart home, home automation, audio or networking row. Its electrician feed says "We also see strong demand for smart home wiring", but none of the ten leads on it when we read it was a smart home job.
Zapo and PromoSEO promise exclusivity and buy the clicks
Zapo "delivers exclusive leads to home automation companies and smart home installers" from search ads, starting "within the next 14 days". Pay £400 for the entry plan and £200 of it reaches Google, for a forecast of 10 home automation leads. Its page names no job types, so a thermostat and a whole-home system come out of the same forecast.
PromoSEO is the one seller that lets you choose: "whole home automation, home cinema setups, audio distribution, smart lighting, smart heating" and more, with "Installers choose the precise services they want to target." It works on "a fixed cost per lead or pay per conversion model", prints a package floor of £500 a month rather than a lead price, says "No leads are shared", and applies a "make good policy" to leads that fail its checks. Both buy their leads in the same Google auction you can bid in yourself.
The directories send one request to several firms
TrustATrader has "Smart Home Installation" and "Home Automation Company" categories, and its smart home page tells the customer "We'll send your request to multiple trusted traders". It prints no membership price. Bark has a Home Automation category with no smart home price shown, Checkatrade lists a Smart Thermostat Installation category, and FindaTradie charges £395 a year for a profile in its Smart Home Installers category. A homeowner pricing a whole-home system against several installers at once is the case the shared-lead trap works through.
Everything here about Leads Do Work'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 smart home 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
Homeowners search for the brand, and the brand clicks are the cheapest.
Installers hardly look for lead sellers here: "home automation leads" manages 10 a month with no advertiser on it, and "smart home leads" doesn't register. The homeowner's side is busier, and it names the product: "hive thermostat installation" gets 2,400 searches a month, about 9 times "smart thermostat installation". Hive, Nest and tado together come to 3,510.
The per-lead column divides each click by 7.33%, WordStream's conversion rate for home improvement search ads, which is US data, so treat it as a rough guide. Some of the Wi-Fi searches will be businesses rather than homes.
| Search | Searches a month | Per click | Per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| sonos installer | 70 | £20.68 | £282 |
| wifi installation | 720 | £15.04 | £205 |
| wifi installation near me | 210 | £12.60 | £172 |
| home wifi installation | 90 | £11.50 | £157 |
| control4 installer | 90 | £9.96 | £136 |
| home automation companies near me | 30 | £8.51 | £116 |
| wifi engineer | 110 | £6.70 | £91 |
| smart lighting installation | 30 | £6.31 | £86 |
| smart home installer | 720 | £6.07 | £83 |
| smart home installer near me | 110 | £5.25 | £72 |
| ethernet cable installation | 170 | £4.95 | £68 |
| tado installation | 390 | £4.09 | £56 |
| smart thermostat installation | 260 | £3.96 | £54 |
| home automation installer | 140 | £3.42 | £47 |
| hive thermostat installation | 2,400 | £3.05 | £42 |
| nest thermostat installation | 720 | £2.40 | £33 |
| ceiling speakers installation | 90 | £1.28 | £17 |
Google Ads data for the UK, pulled 1 October 2026. Click prices are bid-based estimates, so what you actually pay will land near them rather than on them.
The dearest clicks are the ones furthest from heating. "sonos installer" costs £20.68 a click, about £282 a lead, and "wifi installation" £15.04, about £205. A lead off "hive thermostat installation" works out at about £42 and one off "nest thermostat installation" about £33. "smart home installer" sits in between at £6.07, and "control4 installer" at £9.96 is where the whole-home systems are. Across the table a lead from your own ads costs £17 to £282.
A Hive or Nest lead from your own ads, at about £42 and £33, costs more than Leads Do Work's £14 thermostat lead, and nobody else is sold it. The extra pays for steering spend away from thermostats:
- Bid on the brands you actually fit
- Put more behind lighting and whole-home work
- A ceiling on what a Wi-Fi click can cost
- Your firm's name on the ad the customer taps
- Clicks paid to Google, with nothing added
- An ad account that leaves with you
Because the searches name the product, the website they land on should too: the brands you fit, the systems you install, and what each costs. Brand keywords, match types and the rest of the setup are in the Google Ads guide for tradesmen; whether a Sonos click is affordable on your budget is in how much to spend on Google Ads.
Google's Nest finder is a search box
Google's Nest help page says: "To have a trained pro come to your home, install and set up your Nest products, use Google Search." It adds that Google "does not provide, sell or receive compensation for installation services". There's no list to join. Whoever shows up for that search gets the job.
No smart home Local Services Ads
Google's UK category list has no smart home, home automation or home theatre category. "Electricians" and "HVAC (heating or air conditioning)" are the nearest, which suits an electrician or heating engineer who does smart work on the side. If you hold one of those, our Local Services Ads guide covers getting listed.
The lists homeowners are sent to
Some manufacturers will list you for the price of a training course.
None of the lead sellers mentions it, but several of the brands homeowners search for keep their own installer finders. A listing there puts you in front of somebody who has already chosen the kit.
Drayton Wiser
Its finder lets homeowners "use your postcode to search for a Wiser installer in your area". Getting on it means joining Drayton Rewards+, which offers "free training to become a Wiser installer" and says "Join free today".
Loxone and Control4
Loxone's Silver Partners are "visible in our Partner Search", with "no minimum turnover" and Foundation Training as the prerequisite, plus a welcome package to buy. Control4 runs an integrator search for "certified professionals".
CEDIA, the trade body
Homeowners enter a postcode and the system they want. Membership starts at £149 + VAT a year, but the Finder Service Listing comes with the £429 + VAT tier, and priority listing with the £749 + VAT one.
Hive and tado pay you, not with leads
Hive's Installer Club gives points for installs and £50 for each customer you refer to British Gas energy. tado gives points on purchases. Neither has a public UK installer finder that we could find.
A finder listing goes to whoever is listed near the postcode, so treat it as one more source, not as a lead that is yours alone.
What the rules say
Fit a system only installers can buy and the law can treat you as its distributor.
The product security regime under the Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022 has applied since 29 April 2024. It bans universal default passwords and makes makers publish how to report security problems and how long updates will last (gov.uk). Section 7(6) says you are not a distributor when you supply a product by installing it and identical products are sold to consumers in other ways. A Hive or a Nest from the shops is covered by that.
The Act's explanatory notes say the carve-out exists to spare businesses like electricians, and in the same breath that it "ensures that products such as smart home control systems (which are in most cases only made available through a contract for their installation) are in scope". If the system you fit is only sold through installers, you may be its distributor, with the duty not to supply it if you know or believe it fails the security rules.
Part P, in England
Notifiable work is a new circuit, a new consumer unit, or work in a special location such as a bathroom. Approved Document P says "All other electrical installation work is not notifiable", replacements included. A smart switch swap reads as a replacement to us; a new lighting circuit doesn't.
The thermostat and the gas rules
Gas Safe Register says replacing a non-gas part such as a heating control valve inside the boiler casing can be done by an electrician, if no combustion seal, gas carrying part or combustion control module is disturbed. It doesn't mention thermostats by name.
Where boiler fitters get the work
Under Boiler Plus, every new gas combi boiler in England since April 2018 needs an extra efficiency measure, and "Smart controls featuring automation and optimisation functions" is one of the four. A lot of smart heating goes in with the boiler, which is why our plumbing leads guide is the other half of this market.
Through the year
Smart heating fills the winter. Wi-Fi work peaks in summer.
Heating controls sell to cold houses. UK searches for "hive thermostat installation" rose to 5,400 in November and fell to 590 in July, about 9.2 times lower. Nest and tado follow the same curve.
UK searches for "hive thermostat installation", by month
September 2025 to August 2026. Google Ads keyword data, rounded bands.
Wi-Fi runs the other way
"wifi installation" was highest in June at 1,000 and lowest in December and February at 480. A firm that does both heating controls and networks has work for each half of the year.
Move the budget with it
A monthly lead package charges the same in July as in November. Your own ads can follow the curve: heavy on thermostats from October, heavy on networks and lighting in the summer. Checkatrade puts home automation maintenance at £300 to £1,500 a year, which is worth booking in the quiet months.
Where the lead came from
Ask what a smart home lead actually wants before you pay for it.
The ICO puts the checking on you as the buyer. It wants checks in proportion to the risk, and a seller telling you the data is clean doesn't count as one. How UK regulators have dealt with home improvement lead sellers is in our roofing leads guide.
Before you pay for smart home leads, ask:
- Which website or ad did the customer fill in?
- Does the consent name my business?
- How many other installers get it?
- Is it a thermostat, lighting, a network or a whole system?
- Can I return a lead for a job I don't do?
The fourth question matters most here: a package that can't tell a Hive swap from a Control4 system will price both the same.
Which way to go
Don't pay thermostat money for a lead you hoped was a whole house.
Buy per lead if
- You fit thermostats in volume
- A £14 lead fits your margin
- You reply within the hour
- Heating is most of your work
Think twice if
- You want lighting or full systems
- Up to 5 firms can get the call
- The package names no job types
- Nobody says which site it came from
Run your own if
- You fit named brands
- You want the bigger systems
- You want the call to yourself
- The ad account is yours to take
The money in smart home work is in lighting, audio and whole-house systems, and in the maintenance after them. A bought lead can start that, as long as it's priced for what you want rather than what's easiest to sell. How leads are sold in every other trade is in our guide to trade leads. Weighing a directory listing instead? Read is Checkatrade worth it first.
Our sources
Where every smart home figure here came from.
We build websites and run Google Ads for trades, so we have a side in this. It's also why the click table keeps the Sonos and Wi-Fi searches, the ones where our own pitch looks worst.
Seller pages and terms were read on their own sites on 1 October 2026, along with the directories' smart home categories. Search volumes and click prices are Google Ads data for the UK, pulled the same day. Job prices are from Checkatrade's smart thermostat, smart lighting, ceiling speaker, home network and home automation guides and MyBuilder's smart lighting guide. Ownership figures are Ofcom's. The rules come from Google's Nest help and Local Services Ads help, Approved Document P, the Boiler Plus factsheet, Gas Safe Register and legislation.gov.uk, and lead consent from the ICO.
Questions smart home installers ask
Smart home leads, answered.
- How much do smart home leads cost in the UK?
- Leads Do Work is the only seller we found with a per-lead price, and it covers smart thermostats only: £14 a lead from a homeowner and £16 from a business, plus VAT and an £11 weekly fee. Zapo, formerly Get Work, runs search ads for smart home installers from £400 to £1,600 a month plus VAT, and its cheapest plan forecasts 10 leads, so roughly £40 each. PromoSEO's packages start at £500 a month. A click on your own smart home ad costs £1.28 to £20.68.
- Are smart home leads exclusive?
- It depends who sells them. Leads Do Work's terms say 1 to 3 other firms usually get the same job, and never more than 5. Zapo and PromoSEO both say their smart home leads go to one installer. TrustATrader's smart home page tells the customer it will send their request to "multiple trusted traders".
- Which smart home jobs do lead sellers cover?
- Leads Do Work has a row for smart thermostats and nothing for lighting, audio, networks or whole-home systems. PromoSEO lists whole home automation, home cinema, audio distribution, smart lighting, smart heating, CCTV and alarms, access control, blind automation, network upgrades and Wi-Fi among others, and lets you pick. Zapo's page names no job types at all.
- How do homeowners search for a smart home installer?
- Mostly by brand. In the UK, "hive thermostat installation" gets about 2,400 searches a month against 260 for "smart thermostat installation". "nest thermostat installation" gets 720 and "tado installation" 390. Those brand searches are among the cheapest clicks in the trade, at £2.40 to £4.09.
- Can smart home installers use Google Local Services Ads?
- Not under a smart home heading. Google's UK category list has no smart home, home automation or home theatre category. The nearest are "Electricians" and "HVAC (heating or air conditioning)", which fit an electrician or heating engineer who also does smart work.
- Do I need Part P to fit smart light switches?
- In England, notifiable electrical work is a new circuit, a new consumer unit, or work on circuits in a special location such as a bathroom. Approved Document P says all other work, including replacements and additions to existing circuits outside special locations, is not notifiable. Swapping a switch for a smart one reads as a replacement to us, but a new lighting circuit for a whole-house system is notifiable.
- Do I need to be Gas Safe registered to fit a smart thermostat?
- Gas Safe Register's own factsheet doesn't mention thermostats. It says replacing a non-gas part such as a central heating control valve inside the boiler casing can be done by another competent tradesperson, such as an electrician, as long as no combustion seal, gas carrying part or combustion control module is disturbed.
- Does PSTI apply to smart home installers?
- The product security law in force since 29 April 2024 doesn't treat an installer as a distributor when they fit a product that is also sold to consumers in shops. The Act's explanatory notes add that smart home control systems, usually only sold with installation, stay in scope, so an integrator supplying those can take on distributor duties.
- When is smart home work busiest?
- Smart heating is a winter job. UK searches for "hive thermostat installation" peaked at 5,400 in November and fell to 590 in July, about 9.2 times apart. "wifi installation" ran the other way, highest in June.
Keep reading
More straight answers for trades.
Lighting and whole-home jobs in the diary, from customers who searched for you.
We build your website and run Google Ads from an account in your own name, aimed at the brands you fit and the systems that pay rather than every thermostat in the county. See what it costs, then tell us about your business and we'll put the Control4, Sonos and lighting searches ahead of the thermostat ones.