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

The advertised cost per lead is the wrong number, and solar has the widest gap between the two of any trade we track.

Cost per booked job is the only comparable figure:

Cost per booked job = cost per lead ÷ close rate

The ranking

Source	Typical CPL	Exclusive?	Realistic close	Cost per booked job
Referrals / past customers	$0–$200	Yes	30–45%	$0–$650
Your own SEO / organic	Time + content	Yes	15–30%	Low, slow to build
Exclusive solar leads	$100–$300	Yes	15–25%	~$400–$2,000
Pre-set appointments	$150–$400/appt	Yes	15–25%	~$600–$2,600
Door-to-door / canvassing	Labor cost	Yes	5–15%	Highly variable
Shared aggregator leads	$30–$100	Shared, often 4+	4–10%	~$300–$2,500

Solar combines the two things that destroy lead economics: the lead is often sold several times, and the sales cycle is long — financing, roof condition, utility interconnection, and usually a second decision-maker. A $60 shared lead closing 6% costs $1,000 per booked job. A $250 exclusive lead closing 25% costs $1,000 as well — but the second one burns far less of your closers' time to get there, and closer time is the real constraint in a solar operation.

These ranges are compiled from published vendor pricing and industry write-ups and are directional only. There is no audited public dataset of solar lead costs, and most published figures originate with companies that sell leads.

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 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.

What solar permits are actually for

A homeowner who pulled a solar permit has already hired an installer. That sale is gone.

For a solar company, what remains is competitive: 808 distinct installers pulled a permit in the last 30 days, so you can see who is taking volume in your territory, at what pace, and in which neighborhoods. Useful, but incremental.

The larger opportunity in this dataset is not for solar companies at all.

The cross-trade signal: solar permits are a roofing list

This is the most under-used thing in our entire file, and it took us a while to see it.

A solar install is a roof event. Two things follow, and both are money:

1. Panels should go on a roof with life left in it. An array installed on a roof with five years left creates a problem for somebody in five years. A roofer who knows which addresses just went solar knows exactly which roofs are now on a clock — and which homeowners have already demonstrated they will spend on their roof.
2. Remove-and-reinstall is a premium job most roofers never quote. When a roof fails under an existing array, the panels have to come off and go back on. It is specialised, it is priced accordingly, and the roofers who win it are the ones who knew the array was there. A solar permit is a dated public record of exactly which addresses have panels.

We have 5,817 of those records from the last 30 days alone, across 209 cities. No lead vendor sells this, because it does not look like a lead — it looks like somebody else's job. That is precisely why it is available.

How a roofer would actually work this list

The cross-trade play only pays if you know what to do with it, so here is the concrete version.

Segment by permit age. A solar permit from this month tells you an array went up on a roof of unknown condition. A permit from eighteen months ago tells you the same roof is eighteen months further along. Neither is an emergency — that is the point. This is a pipeline list, not a call-today list, and treating it like the latter is how people conclude permit data does not work.

The three messages that fit, in order of how well they land:

1. Pre-emptive inspection. "You put panels on last spring. Before your warranty period ends, it is worth knowing how many years the roof underneath has left — because removing an array to re-roof costs far more than sequencing it the other way round." This is true, useful, and nobody else is saying it.
2. Remove-and-reinstall capability. Most homeowners with panels have no idea who would do this work, and most roofers do not advertise it. Being the local firm that says "we do R&R" is a positioning win that costs nothing.
3. Storm response. After a hail or wind event, homes with arrays are a distinct and harder claim. Knowing which addresses have panels before you canvass a storm zone is a genuine advantage over the trucks that show up cold.

What does not work: treating a fresh solar permit as a roofing lead. The homeowner just spent five figures on their roof's surface and is not buying a new roof this quarter. Anyone who sells you this data as "hot roofing leads" is doing the thing we spend the rest of this page warning you about.

What we actually have

Metric	Last 30 days
Solar permits	5,817
Cities	237
With a contractor name	3,359 (56%)
Distinct installers	808

Market	Solar permits (30d)
New York, NY	710
Sacramento, CA	344
San Jose, CA	308
San Diego, CA	293
Sacramento County, CA	240
Phoenix, AZ	202
Chicago, IL	200
Anne Arundel County, MD	178

That concentration is worth a moment: California, New York, Arizona and Maryland are exactly where residential solar actually is. We did not curate that list — it fell out of the data, which is a useful check that the classification is finding real solar rather than matching the word "solar" in unrelated descriptions.

Coverage varies by city because permit offices vary, and solar is classified differently in different jurisdictions — our filter combines trade category, permit type and description text rather than trusting one field. Check your metro on the city list before subscribing.

The honest summary

For a solar installer, this is a competitive-intelligence file, not a lead list, and we would rather say so than sell you a subscription you cancel in month two.

For a roofer, it is something better: a dated list of every address in your market that just put panels on a roof — the population most likely to need a roof decision on a clock, and the only population where remove-and-reinstall work exists at all.

$149/month flat. Cancel anytime.

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Related: Roofing leads ranked · Commercial roofing · Contractor leads, all trades · city list