Roofing Leads: Every Source Ranked by Real Cost Per Lead (2026)

The advertised cost per lead is the wrong number. Every roofing 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 / content	~$0 marginal after build	Yes	30–40%	lowest at scale, slowest to start
Google Local Service Ads	~$75–$100 per lead	Effectively yes	15–25%	~$300–$650
Google Ads (PPC)	$50–$300+ in competitive metros	Yes	15–25%	~$200–$1,500
Exclusive purchased leads	$100–$200	Yes	30–35%	~$300–$650
Modernize	~$35–$100	Shared	10–15%	~$300–$1,000
CraftJack	~$20–$60	Shared (fewer)	10–15%	~$150–$600
Networx	~$40	Shared	10–15%	~$250–$400
Angi / HomeAdvisor	$15–$100 (roofing at the top) + ~$300/yr	Shared, often 3–8 ways	7–15%	~$300–$1,250+

Sourcing note, and please hold every vendor to it: the CPL ranges above are compiled from published vendor pricing pages and industry marketing write-ups. Nearly every "average roofing CPL" number circulating online traces back to a company that sells leads or sells marketing to roofers. There is no audited public dataset of roofing lead costs. Treat all of it as directional, ask any vendor for your market's numbers in writing, and pay attention to the one authority that has actually examined these claims under oath — see below.

The regulator has already looked at this

This is the part most "roofing leads" pages leave out.

In March 2022 the FTC filed an administrative complaint against HomeAdvisor alleging that, since at least mid-2014, it made false, misleading or unsubstantiated claims about the quality and source of the leads it sold to service providers. Two of the allegations are worth reading twice if you have ever bought a shared lead:

• Providers were told they would receive leads matching the services they offer and their preferred geographic area — and many did not.
• HomeAdvisor told providers its leads converted into jobs at rates it could not substantiate.

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 — more than $3 million in the first round.

Read the primary sources rather than anyone's summary: FTC order requiring payment of up to $7.2M (Jan 2023) · Final order approved (Apr 2023) · 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 it is the number their pricing depends on. Measure your own.

Worked math: why the cheap lead is the expensive one

Scenario A — shared marketplace lead, sold four ways. You pay $85. Three competitors get the same homeowner within minutes. You are now in a four-way price fight before you have said a word, and the homeowner has been trained by the platform to expect competing quotes. A realistic close on a 4-way shared roofing lead is 10%.

$85 ÷ 0.10 = $850 per booked job

At a $15,280 median residential roof, that is 5.5% of revenue spent on acquisition — before you have paid for a truck, a crew, or a single bundle of shingles.

Scenario B — exclusive lead. You pay $200. Nobody else gets it. You call first, you are the only quote, and a realistic close is 35%.

$200 ÷ 0.35 = $571 per booked job

The $85 lead is 49% more expensive per job than the $200 lead. That is the whole game, and it is why "affordable roofing leads" is usually the most expensive phrase in this industry.

Scenario C — what a 5-point close-rate swing is worth. Take the same $85 shared lead. At 10% you pay $850 per job. At 15% you pay $567. Nothing about the lead changed — only speed-to-call and follow-up discipline. Your close rate is worth more than your lead price. Fix it before you shop vendors.

Commercial roofing is a different market

Commercial roofing leads barely exist as a purchasable product, which is why the search term is so cheap and so poorly served. Marketplaces are built around homeowner form-fills; a facilities manager re-roofing a 40,000 sq ft warehouse is not filling in an Angi form.

Commercial roofing work is found three ways: relationships with property managers and GCs, bid boards, and permit records — because a commercial re-roof is permitted like any other job, usually with the building's owner or management company named on the record. That is the one channel where public data genuinely beats a lead marketplace, simply because no marketplace is competing for it.

What permit data actually is — and what it isn't

Here is the honest version, which most permit-data marketing gets wrong.

A homeowner who has pulled a roof permit has already hired a roofer. That job is sold. If a vendor tells you permit records are a list of homeowners waiting for your quote, they are overselling and you should discount everything else they say.

What roof permits are genuinely the best available source for:

1. Territory — which streets are being re-roofed right now. Roof permits cluster hard, because roof damage is a weather event, not an individual decision. In the last 30 days our data shows Wichita filed 1,227 roof permits, and they are not spread evenly: zip 67205 alone accounts for 238, zip 67212 for 218, zip 67203 for 106. That is a storm map with street addresses on it. If you canvass, that is the difference between knocking a random subdivision and knocking the one where every third house has a new roof going on.

2. Competitive intelligence. Every permit names the contractor and, where the jurisdiction publishes it, the declared job value. You can see which companies are taking volume in your zip codes and what they are declaring per job. Across the last 30 days that is 4,340 distinct roofing contractors and a $15,280 median declared value.

3. Timing on adjacent trades. A re-roof is frequently followed by gutters, solar, attic insulation, interior water-damage repair, and sometimes a full exterior. A roof permit dated last week is a real, dated signal for those trades — which is a better lead than a form-fill, because something verifiably happened.

What our roofing coverage actually looks like

Numbers below are from our own tracked permits, last 30 days. Published because a comparison table full of other people's marketing claims and none of your own is not worth reading.

Roofing permits tracked (30d)	15,907
Cities	349
Distinct roofing contractors	4,340
Median declared job value	$15,280
Carrying a usable street address	15,422 (97.0%)
Naming the contractor	8,385 (52.7%)
Naming the property owner	2,786 (17.5%)
Carrying a declared value	6,305 (39.6%)

Two of those numbers deserve to be stated plainly rather than buried: owner name is present on 17.9% of roof permits, and declared value on 39.2%. Those fields depend entirely on what each city publishes, and no vendor — us included — can conjure a field a jurisdiction does not release. Address coverage is 97.0%, which is the field that actually drives canvassing.

Volume is seasonal and this is the peak:

Month (2026)	Roofing permits
February	7,134
March	10,391
April	11,908
May	14,899
June	20,617
July	16,885

Deepest markets in the last 30 days: Wichita (1,214), Miami (745), Miami-Dade County (703), Polk County FL (580), Denver (464), Saint Paul (416), San Antonio (326), Sacramento County (308), Spokane (298).

On the contractor side we hold 29,020 roofing contractor profiles with a phone number on 10,066 of them (34.7%) — which is the number to use if you sell to roofers rather than compete with them.

How to actually decide

1. Measure your close rate per source before you spend another dollar. You cannot rank sources without it, and it is the number the FTC found a major marketplace could not substantiate.
2. Rank by cost per booked job, never CPL. Put the formula in your CRM.
3. Fix speed-to-call first. A five-point close-rate improvement beats any discount a vendor will give you.
4. Stop buying leads shared more than two ways unless your close rate on them genuinely exceeds 15% — measure it, don't assume it.
5. Use territory data to make your cheapest channels work harder. Canvassing, door hangers and direct mail are near-free per contact; the reason they underperform is that they are aimed randomly. They stop being random when you know which zips are being re-roofed this month.

Track roofing permits in your market

• Roofing permits in Wichita — the fleet's busiest roofing market
• Roofing permits in Miami
• Roofing permits in Denver
• Roofing contractors in Miami
• Exclusive roofing leads — how our data compares
• Browse every city we cover

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CPL ranges are compiled from published vendor pricing and industry write-ups and are directional only — there is no audited public dataset of roofing lead costs, and most published figures originate with companies that sell leads. FTC facts are from the Commission's own press releases and case file, linked above. Permit figures are PermitGrab's own tracked data for the 30 days ending 2026-07-31 and will move as coverage grows.