Last updated 23 September 2026
Trade leads are sold four ways. Each decides who else gets the call.
Leads Do Work prices about 190 kinds of job, from £5 for a handyman lead to £84 for a loft room conversion, plus VAT and an £11 weekly fee. Zapo, formerly Get Work, charges £400 to £1,600 a month plus VAT to run search ads for you. Checkatrade's paid tiers start at £30 a month. Buy the click yourself and a homeowner's search for a trade costs £3.24 to £21.52.
Those prices matter less than two lines in the small print: how many other trades are handed the same customer, and how long you get before they ring first. This guide sets the models side by side, then sends you to the guide for your own trade.
Read the sharing clause
One seller puts the headcount in writing.
Leads Do Work's pay-per-lead terms say: "Customers compete with 1 to 3 tradesmen for the same work, with no more than 5 competing for any given job." Most sellers keep that number off the sales page. Model by model.
Where we stand
We don't sell trade leads. We help you get your own.
This guide is the honest version of what buying trade leads costs, and who else gets them. What we do instead is build trades 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.
The four models
Four ways to sell one customer's phone number.
The sellers that come up for "trade leads" look alike on the surface. Underneath, each runs one of four models, and the model tells you more than the brochure does.
| Model | How you pay | Who else gets the lead | Sold by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared marketplace | Per lead, in credits or a fee | Up to 3, or up to 5, by site | MyJobQuote, Bark, MyBuilder, Leads Do Work |
| Pay per lead | Per lead, price by phone | One other firm, on premium leads | Leads 2 Trade |
| Managed ads | £400 to £1,600 + VAT a month | Nobody, by its own terms | Get Work (now Zapo) |
| Directory membership | Monthly, or a 12-month plan | Other members, on open boards | Checkatrade, UKTradesHub |
Shared marketplaces: the count is in the terms
MyJobQuote says "Up to 3 tradesmen can accept details for each job lead", disputes are allowed only for bad contact details or duplicates, refunds come back as credit rather than to your card, and unused credits expire after 6 months. Bark sells credits at £1.80 each plus VAT, and up to 5 professionals can answer one request. On MyBuilder the homeowner picks a shortlist, and its terms say the fee is due once your details are shared, "It is not necessary for you to be awarded the Job".
Leads Do Work is the only seller here that prints a full price list: about 190 job types, each with its own price per lead. Its Connect plan adds an £11 weekly fee, sends leads to Connect accounts "first, providing an advantage over other companies and tradesmen", and reviews each return request by hand. Its Smart Local packs of 5, 10 or 20 leads carry no individual returns at all, and a pack already paid for is not refunded.
Leads 2 Trade: product installers, not every trade
Leads 2 Trade has sold home improvement leads since 2006, and its list is products: boilers, windows and doors, conservatories, insulation, solar panels, heat pumps, air conditioning, and also hearing aids and card payment terminals. There is no roofing, electrical or general building category. It charges per lead with "no joining or subscription fees", but prices are given by phone only. Premium leads go "to yourself and one other company", a lead can be rejected within 72 hours on its listed grounds, and members need 12 months of trading and no CCJs.
Zapo, formerly Get Work: a monthly fee, half of it ad spend
Zapo, formerly Get Work, builds you a website and runs search ads that send the leads to you alone. Its Launch plan is £400 a month plus VAT, £200 of it ad budget, for an estimated 10 leads, so about £40 per estimated lead. Get Work's own list of trades runs to twelve, from roofing and building to plastering, joinery and loft conversions, and it says it works with "one tradesperson, per trade, per area". Zapo contracts run month to month; Get Work's plans renew automatically.
Directories: pay to be listed, then pay for leads
Checkatrade publishes an entry tier at £30 a month and a Growth tier from £59. Its lead plan is a 12-month Fixed Plan with no published price and a lead estimate its terms call "not binding". On its Opportunities Board, "multiple trades may unlock the same Opportunity". Since September 2026, Rated People's leads go to Checkatrade members, so that route now runs through the same door. Whether the membership pays is its own guide: is Checkatrade worth it.
UKTradesHub is free to join, with Pro at £49 and Premium at £149 a month listed as coming soon. Paying tiers see each job first, and its free pool gets leads only "when the pool has fewer than 5 trades", at most one an hour. Several trades on its list, builders and kitchen fitters among them, are marked coming soon too.
Two that sell no lead at all
NeedHelp is free for trades and passes on jobs from retailers such as B&Q, Screwfix and Topps Tiles. Its UK terms charge the customer a fee of 20% of the job price you agree, or 21.5% for painting, flooring and tiling, so the platform earns on every job you win there. BuildAlert sells no enquiry: it gives you planning applications and posts your letter to the applicant at £2 each, on plans of £50 to £500 a month. Its own FAQ notes that planning data is public, so "other tradespeople could identify the same projects".
Every model above that shares a customer turns your quote into a race. What that race costs across a year is worked through in the shared-lead trap.
Everything here about Leads Do Work's contract comes from its own published terms and conditions, last read on 23 September 2026. Terms get revised, so check yours against the current version before you act on anything.
Rather have trade 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 trade customers straight to you, in an ad account in your name that stays yours if you ever leave.
See pricingPrice against job size
The cheapest lead can be the dearest one you buy.
Because Leads Do Work prices every job type, its list can be laid against what the jobs are worth. Here are five jobs from four trades, with its price for each lead and what that comes to per job won at one win in 3.
| Job | Typical UK price | Leads Do Work, per lead | Per job won |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clear a blocked drain | £175 | £25 + VAT | £75, 43% of the job |
| Boiler breakdown repair | £275 | £12 + VAT | £36, 13% of the job |
| Like-for-like combi, supply and fit | £2,500 to £4,000 | £31 + VAT | £93, 3% of the job |
| New bathroom, supplied and fitted | £5,500 to £8,000 | £36 + VAT | £108, 2% of the job |
| Garage conversion, integral or attached | £10,000 to £20,000 | £49 + VAT | £147, 1% of the job |
Job prices from Checkatrade's cost guides (March 2026, and May 2026 for the garage), each worked at the middle of its range. Lead prices are Leads Do Work's Connect list for homeowner leads. One win in 3 is MyJobQuote's figure for its trades, not a measured rate for these leads.
From the cheapest lead on that list to the dearest, the price goes up about 4 times. The jobs go up about 86 times. So a £175 drain job gives away 43% of its value to win it, well over the 10 to 15 percent a won customer should cost, while the garage conversion gives away 1%.
If your jobs are small and quick
Drain clearance, repairs and odd jobs need the lowest price per lead there is, or no bought leads at all. The sums for those trades are in plumbing leads and handyman leads.
If your jobs run to thousands
A bought lead is a small slice of a big job, so the question moves from price to sharing and fit. Conversions and extensions are covered in builder leads.
Your numbers
Work out the most a lead is worth to you.
Start from one of the five jobs or type in your own average, set how many quotes it takes you to land one, then put in the price a seller has quoted you.
WHAT CAN YOU PAY FOR A TRADE 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
£163
a lead, winning one in 3
- Healthy range, per won job
- £325 to £488
- Which per lead is
- £108 to £163
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 band is a rule of thumb, not a measured figure.
Buying the click yourself
Urgency sets the dearest clicks, not the trade.
"plumber near me" is searched 90,500 times a month at £8.09 a click. Add the word "emergency" and the click costs £21.52, about 2.7 times as much. Electricians show the same jump, £7.01 to £13.21. To turn clicks into leads we use WordStream's 7.33% conversion rate for home improvement search ads, a US figure, so treat the last column as a guide.
| Search | Searches a month | Per click | Per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| emergency plumber | 12,100 | £21.52 | £294 |
| emergency electrician | 4,400 | £13.21 | £180 |
| removals near me | 5,400 | £8.84 | £121 |
| plumber near me | 90,500 | £8.09 | £110 |
| find a tradesman | 2,400 | £7.23 | £99 |
| electrician near me | 74,000 | £7.01 | £96 |
| kitchen fitters near me | 6,600 | £6.98 | £95 |
| scaffolding near me | 6,600 | £6.55 | £89 |
| roofers near me | 33,100 | £5.15 | £70 |
| bathroom fitters near me | 8,100 | £4.94 | £67 |
| carpenter near me | 12,100 | £4.78 | £65 |
| tree surgeon near me | 12,100 | £3.81 | £52 |
| handyman near me | 18,100 | £3.75 | £51 |
| painter and decorator near me | 18,100 | £3.31 | £45 |
| builders near me | 18,100 | £3.26 | £44 |
| plasterer near me | 14,800 | £3.24 | £44 |
| landscapers near me | 6,600 | £3.24 | £44 |
Google Ads data for the UK, pulled 23 September 2026. Click prices are bid-based estimates, so most advertisers pay less per click.
At £44 to £294 a lead on these figures, your own ads cost more per lead than most prices on a seller's list. The difference is what arrives: a customer who searched, found your business and rang you, with no queue of rivals behind them.
- Nobody else is handed the same number
- Bid on the jobs you want, skip the rest
- Turn it down in a quiet month
- You pay Google direct, no markup
- The ad account is in your name
Whatever your trade, the monthly number to start from is in how much to spend on Google Ads.
Your trade
Now read the guide for the work you do.
Each of these 26 guides names the sellers for that trade, what its jobs are worth, when its customers search, and the rules that decide which leads you can take on.
Building and structure
Heating, power and glazing
Rooms and finishes
Outdoors, cleaning and moving
Through the year
Homeowners look hardest in autumn and least at Christmas.
"find a tradesman" belongs to no single trade, so it shows the tide under all of them. It peaked in September and October, dipped in December, and sat level for the rest of the year.
UK searches for "find a tradesman", by month
September 2025 to August 2026. Google Ads keyword data, rounded bands.
A gentle swing overall
The busiest months ran about 1.5 times the quietest. Some single trades swing harder, which is why each trade guide charts its own search.
Fixed fees ignore it
A monthly plan or a directory membership bills the same in December as in September and October. A budget you control can follow the searches down and back up.
The race after the lead
Some platforms time you in minutes.
UKTradesHub's terms offer each job to Premium members first, for 5 minutes, then to Pro members for 15, then to the free pool for 60. Leads Do Work tells its buyers "Jobs are not guaranteed, so customers must respond quickly." On a shared lead, the tradesman on a roof or under a sink when the alert lands starts behind.
Get Work's home page says you are "100x more likely" to reach a lead in the first 5 minutes. That figure goes back to a 2007 study of six companies, which its authors say "did not address close ratios". The sturdier finding is Harvard Business Review's 2011 look at 1.25 million leads: firms that tried within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as firms that tried even an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that left it a day. Reaching someone is not winning the job, but it comes first.
Emergency work is not treated like a quote
A job agreed in a customer's home can usually be cancelled within 14 days under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. The regulations exclude a visit the customer asked for "for the purpose of carrying out urgent repairs or maintenance". The burst pipe and the dead fuse board, the dearest searches in the table above, will often sit on that side of the line.
Whose data it is
Buy a lead and the data duty comes with it.
Leads 2 Trade says so plainly in its FAQ: "On receipt of a lead provided by Leads 2 Trade you automatically become the Data Controller", and you must be able to show the ICO your own data protection measures. That holds whoever you buy from. The ICO's guidance expects a buyer to make "proportionate checks and due diligence", and says a seller's assurance is not enough.
The risk is not theoretical for home improvement. The ICO fined lead seller Lead Pronto £30,000 in November 2025 after its privacy policy named none of the 18 firms it passed customers to. That case and the others behind it are set out in our roofing leads guide.
Whatever the trade, ask any seller:
- Which website did this lead come from?
- Does the consent name my business?
- How many other trades will get it?
- How long before it is sold again?
- What can I send back, and by when?
Which way to go
Pick the model by the size of your jobs and your diary.
Shared leads if
- Your jobs are big
- You can ring in minutes
- You like the odds at 1 in 3
- You check each consent
A monthly plan if
- You want leads kept to you
- Your trade is on its list
- You can ride a slow month
- You read the renewal terms
Your own ads if
- Your jobs are small or urgent
- You want nobody else called
- You set the budget monthly
- Your account, kept if you leave
Plenty of trades run two at once, a marketplace to cover a gap and their own ads for the work they want more of. If a directory is on the table, is Checkatrade worth it weighs the membership, and is Bark worth it does the same for credits.
Our sources
Where these figures come from.
We build websites and run Google Ads for trades, so we are not neutral, and we have said above where a bought lead is the cheaper way to get a phone number. Each seller is quoted from its own pages.
Seller pages, price lists and terms were read on their own sites on 23 September 2026. Click prices and search volumes are Google Ads data for the UK, pulled the same day. Job prices are from Checkatrade's cost guides. The data protection points come from the ICO and the cancellation rules from legislation.gov.uk.
Questions trades ask
Trade leads, answered.
- What are trade leads?
- A trade lead is the contact details of someone who wants work done, sold or passed to a tradesperson. They come four ways: a marketplace that shares each job among several trades, a lead seller that charges per lead, a company that runs search ads for you for a monthly fee, and a directory you pay to be listed in. The model decides the price and how many rivals ring the same customer.
- How much do trade leads cost?
- It depends on the trade and the job. Leads Do Work publishes a price for about 190 job types, from £5 to £84 a lead plus VAT, with an £11 weekly fee on its Connect plan. Zapo, formerly Get Work, charges £400 to £1,600 a month plus VAT to run search ads for you. Bark credits are £1.80 each plus VAT. Checkatrade's paid tiers start at £30 a month, and its lead plan is priced individually. Leads 2 Trade gives prices by phone.
- Are trade leads shared with other tradesmen?
- On most marketplaces, yes, and the number is in the terms. MyJobQuote lets up to 3 tradesmen take each lead. Bark lets up to 5 professionals respond. Leads Do Work says its customers compete with 1 to 3 others, never more than 5 on one job. Leads 2 Trade sends its premium leads to you and one other firm. Zapo says its leads are exclusive, and Get Work works with one tradesperson per trade per area.
- Are free trade lead sites really free?
- Free to join, usually paid for somewhere else. NeedHelp costs a trade nothing to join, and its UK terms charge the customer a fee of 20% of the agreed job price, or 21.5% for painting, flooring and tiling. UKTradesHub is free today, with paid tiers of £49 and £149 a month marked coming soon, and its free pool only gets a job after paying members have passed on it.
- Which kind of trade lead suits a small job?
- The cheapest per lead, because the lead is a bigger slice of a small job. At one win in 3, a £25 drain clearance lead costs about £75 per job won, which is 43% of a £175 job. The same sum on a garage conversion lead comes to about 1% of the job. Trades that live on small, fast jobs need a low price per lead or their own ads.
- Is it legal to buy trade leads?
- Yes, and the duty to check them is yours. The ICO expects a business buying marketing data to carry out proportionate checks and due diligence rather than take the seller's word. Leads 2 Trade's own FAQ tells its members that on receiving a lead they automatically become the data controller, with their own data protection duties to show the ICO.
- When do people look for a tradesman most?
- UK searches for "find a tradesman" were highest in September and October and lowest in December, about 1.5 times quieter at the bottom. Each trade has its own pattern, which its own guide charts.
Keep reading
More straight answers for trades.
Build a diary of customers who found you, not a lead list.
Whatever your trade, we build a website that turns a search into a call and set up Google Ads in an account under your own name, which you keep if you ever leave. Check the price first, or message us with a question.