HVAC Leads: Every Source Ranked by Real Cost Per Booked Job (2026)

The advertised cost per lead is the wrong number. Every HVAC lead vendor markets a per-lead price. Almost none of them market the two numbers that decide whether you make money: how many other contractors got the same lead, and what share of those leads you actually close.

Cost per booked job is the only number that matters:

Cost per booked job = cost per lead ÷ close rate

Run that on the real ranges and the ranking inverts. Here it is.

The ranking

Source	Typical CPL	Exclusive?	Realistic close	Cost per booked job
Referrals / past customers	$0–$150	Yes	40–50%	$0–$300
Your own SEO / organic	Time + content	Yes	25–40%	Low, slow to build
Google Local Service Ads	$80–$120	Effectively	15–25%	~$320–$800
Exclusive purchased leads	$100–$250	Yes	25–35%	~$300–$1,000
CraftJack	$25–$75	Shared (fewer)	10–15%	~$170–$750
Modernize / Networx	$40–$120	Shared	10–15%	~$270–$1,200
Angi / HomeAdvisor	$25–$100 + ~$300/yr	Shared, often 3–8 ways	7–15%	~$330–$1,400+

The cheap lead is the expensive one. A $90 shared lead sold four ways, closing 10%, costs $900 per booked job. A $220 exclusive lead closing 30% costs $733. The $90 lead is 23% more expensive per job — and in HVAC it is worse than the arithmetic suggests, because a shared emergency lead is a race decided in minutes. You are not competing on quality. You are competing on who was holding their phone.

These CPL ranges are compiled from published vendor pricing and industry write-ups and are directional only. There is no audited public dataset of HVAC lead costs, and most published figures originate with companies that sell leads. Treat any precise-looking number in this category — including a vendor's quoted close rate — as marketing until someone shows you the methodology.

The regulator has already examined these claims

In March 2022 the FTC filed an administrative complaint alleging that since at least mid-2014 HomeAdvisor made false, misleading or unsubstantiated claims about the quality and source of the leads it sold — including telling providers that leads converted into jobs at rates it could not substantiate, and selling leads that did not match the services or geography the provider signed up for.

HomeAdvisor agreed to an order requiring payment of up to $7.2 million. The FTC approved the final consent order in April 2023 and began returning money to affected businesses that November.

Primary sources: the $7.2M order · final order · case file.

The lesson is not "never buy leads." It is that the conversion rate a vendor quotes you is the least reliable number in the transaction — and a federal regulator has now said so on the record.

The source nobody prices: permits

Here is the part most vendors get wrong on purpose.

A homeowner who has pulled an HVAC permit has already hired an HVAC contractor. That install is gone. Any vendor selling permit data as "homeowners waiting for your quote" is overselling, and you should discount everything else they tell you.

We will also tell you what permit data cannot do. A "your system is 14 years old, time to replace" play requires a decade or more of permit history to identify equipment at end of life. Our HVAC archive goes back about eighteen months. If someone sells you replacement-timing data, ask them how many years deep their permit file actually is — and ask before you pay, not after.

What HVAC permits are genuinely the best available source for:

1. The service-contract annuity

A system installed this week starts a maintenance relationship that runs ten to fifteen years. The company that installed it does not automatically win the service agreement — installers are often volume shops with no service arm, and homeowners frequently never establish a maintenance relationship at all.

The permit gives you the address and the month the warranty clock started. That is a far better list than a cold neighborhood than "everyone in zip 78704."

2. Competitive intelligence

10,446 distinct HVAC contractors pulled a permit in the last 30 days. You can see who is taking volume in your zips, on what job types, and what they declare per job.

This is the only file in the trade where you can see your competitors' activity while they cannot see yours. Most contractors have never looked at it.

3. Route density

HVAC margin dies in the truck. A call list that clusters into two neighborhoods is worth more than a longer list scattered across a metro, even at a worse close rate. Permits carry street addresses, so density is something you can actually engineer.

4. New-construction relationships

Install permits on new builds name the general contractor. That is a B2B introduction — a relationship worth many installs — rather than a homeowner cold call. It is the highest-value row in the file and almost nobody works it.

What we actually have

Trade	Permits, last 30 days
HVAC	49,553
Electrical	38,736
Plumbing	34,692
Roofing	15,895

HVAC is the largest trade in our file: 49,553 permits across 405 cities, of which 27,197 carry a contractor name.

Metro	HVAC permits (30d)	With a contractor name
New York, NY	3,054	3,054
Austin, TX	1,229	1,228
San Antonio, TX	1,228	1,062
Minneapolis, MN	955	955
Saint Paul, MN	841	841
San Diego, CA	817	817

Phone coverage, stated plainly: 6,422 of those 49,553 permits — 13% — carry a phone number on the record itself. The rest give you a business name and a job address. A vendor implying every row is a phone number is describing a product nobody has, and we would rather you know the real figure before you pay.

Coverage varies by city because permit offices vary, and some cities publish permits with no contractor field at all. Check your metro on the city list before you subscribe.

The honest hierarchy

If you are deciding where the next dollar goes, in order of cost per booked job:

1. Referrals and past customers. Cheapest per job, always. Most contractors under-invest here because it is not a purchasable channel.
2. Your own SEO and Google Local Service Ads. Slow to build, then durable.
3. Exclusive purchased leads. Expensive per lead, defensible per job.
4. Shared marketplace leads. Last, and only with your close rate measured — not the vendor's quoted one.

Territory and competitive data make the cheap end of that list work harder. Knowing which addresses just started a maintenance clock, and which competitors are taking your zips, improves the close rate on leads you are already buying. That is the honest role of permit data: not a replacement for lead generation, but the layer that makes it convert.

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