A home services lead from Google Search ran a median of $90.92 in LocaliQ and WordStream's 2025 benchmark. A roofing lead in the same report ran $228.15. Both figures are real, both come from one dataset, and neither is a quote for your business. So when you ask us "how much does advertising with Google cost," the useful answer is not a single average. It is a small set of numbers you can plan against for thirty days and then replace with your own.
Paid search buys the first of the six growth levers we work through with local owners: Attention, meaning whether the people already searching for your trade inside your service radius can find you. What you pay for that attention only starts to mean something once it reaches Conversion, the lever that decides what happens after somebody raises a hand. A $9 click that rings into voicemail ends up costing more than a $30 click that turns into a booked furnace replacement.
How much does advertising with Google cost right now
Google sells three different purchases under one account, and they bill in three different ways. Standard Search campaigns charge per click, so your invoice is clicks multiplied by whatever each auction settled at. Local Services Ads charge per valid lead instead, which means you pay when a call or message comes through rather than when somebody taps your ad. Performance Max sits between them: you set an average daily budget or a campaign total, and Google spends it across Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail and more, treating your target cost per action as a bidding signal rather than an agreed price.
None of the three has a published rate, so Google Ads pricing is not something you can look up and budget from. If you want the setup side of this, our guide on how to advertise on Google covers campaign structure and keyword choices. This post stays on the money.
Why no two businesses pay the same
Google runs an auction every time somebody searches, and different ad positions on the same result page can run separate auctions. Your bid states the most you are willing to pay for a click, and Google says the amount actually charged is often less than that. Ad Rank sets the order using your bid alongside ad and landing page quality, the context of the search, and the expected impact of your assets, so a competitor with a stronger landing page can sit above you while paying less per click.
The thresholds an ad has to clear move around too, varying by position, query, location, device, and quality. Google also notes that when a single eligible ad turns up for a search, it can pay the reserve price.
What a click, a lead, and a booked job each cost
Cost per click is spend divided by clicks, and it describes how efficiently the auction delivered traffic. Cost per lead is spend divided by tracked conversions, which for most local businesses means calls, form fills, and chats counted together. Neither number tells you what a customer cost, because a tracked lead can be a wrong number or a job well outside your service area.
The number worth managing is spend divided by booked jobs, and Google Ads will never report it, because the booking happens in your calendar, not in the ad account.
What local trades pay per Search lead
LocaliQ's 2025 home services report is the closest public reference for a local trade. It covers 3,211 U.S. search campaigns running from April 1, 2024 to March 21, 2025, with at least 103 active campaigns behind every category, and it reports medians rather than averages. The publisher says its platform traffic is roughly 80 to 85 percent Google and 15 to 20 percent Microsoft, so these are search figures rather than Google-only figures.
- HVAC and air conditioning: $9.68 per click and $127.74 per lead, at a 6.56% conversion rate
- Plumbing: $10.49 per click and $129.02 per lead, at 7.63%
- Roofing and gutters: $10.70 per click and $228.15 per lead, at 3.70%
- Electrical: $12.18 per click and $93.69 per lead, at 9.08%
- Landscaping: $8.76 per click and $117.92 per lead, at 6.42%
The broader categories read lower because blending hides the trades inside them. Home and home improvement sits at $90.92 per lead in both the 2025 table and the newer 2026 one, dentists and dental services at $72.97 per lead on an $8.00 click in the 2026 data, and attorneys and legal services at $131.63. Those two reports cover different campaign windows and different samples, so pick the one closest to your work instead of averaging them together.
The all-industry figures of $5.26 per click and $70.11 per lead are context only, since every local trade listed above them costs more.
How Local Services Ads change the pricing model
Local Services Ads bill for valid leads rather than clicks, and Google says the price of a valid lead varies by location, job type, lead type, and bidding mode. You set an average weekly budget, and Google calculates the monthly maximum as that weekly figure multiplied by the average number of weeks in a month. Message leads are typically priced below the matching phone lead, though Google is careful to say that is not always true, and its recommended target bid sits around the average price advertisers are paying for leads.
Third-party samples fill in a rough sense of scale. The Media Captain published HVAC at $80, plumbing at $69, roofing at $162, and landscaping at $39 per lead across more than 100 clients in August 2025. SearchLight Digital's February 2026 look at 888 contractors, $6.72 million in spend, and 126,650 leads reported electrical at $39, HVAC at $51, and plumbing at $57. The 99 Calls estimator, updated in August 2026 from Google Ads API data, put roofing at a $156.60 average and a $129.55 median, though only 11 sites sit behind it.
Two HVAC numbers of $80 and $51 come from different agency-owned samples and cannot be averaged into a rate. Read them as a range, and keep the product distinction intact: a Local Services lead price and a Search cost per lead only sit side by side if both count a lead the same way. Google has also announced that Local Services Ads are moving into a specialized Performance Max campaign with pay-per-lead goals, with valid-lead billing and Search and Maps placement staying in place. That rollout is ongoing, so check what your own account is running.
What a first test costs per month
Your Google Ads cost per month is an output of two decisions rather than a figure you pick off a page: how many leads you want to see before you judge the channel, and the planning cost per lead you are using to get there.
Ten raw leads at the $90.92 home services median works out to $909.20 in media, which across Google's 30.4-day month is a $29.91 average daily budget. Twenty leads is $1,818.40, or $59.82 a day. Planning at the HVAC median instead, ten leads is $1,277.40 and $42.02 a day, and at the roofing median it is $2,281.50 and $75.05 a day. Ten leads is a small diagnostic sample rather than proof of anything, and twenty gives you more observations without settling a long-run cost.
An average daily budget is genuinely an average. For most campaigns Google sets the daily spending limit at twice your average daily budget and the monthly limit at 30.4 times it, so Google's own example of a $10 daily budget carries a $20 daily limit and a $304 monthly limit. A $500 month works out to roughly 5.5 leads at the $90.92 planning number, which is a thin sample rather than an argument against starting small.
All of these are media figures. Management, creative, landing page work, and your own sales time sit outside them, which is why a blended quote is hard to compare against one that separates the lines. Capacity belongs in the same conversation: if you can take two more jobs a week, a lead target built for twenty is buying work you would struggle to serve well.
The most you can afford to pay for a lead
Work the number backward from what a sold job is worth to you. If you can spend $400 to acquire a sold job and one in five raw leads becomes work, your maximum affordable raw cost per lead is $80, because $400 multiplied by 0.20 is $80. Run it the other direction and the same close rate says a $90.92 lead produces a $454.60 media cost per sold job.
Both figures are arithmetic built on example inputs rather than claims about your industry, and the point of running them is the gap they expose. An HVAC business planning at the $127.74 median needs either a close rate or an average job value that carries that number, and finding out which of the two is short is more useful than shaving a dollar off the cost per click.
When your own numbers take over
Thirty days of your own data beats any national median, because the auction you are actually in is local and seasonal, shaped by the words people type when their furnace quits. We looked for a Watertown, Brookings, Sioux Falls, or statewide South Dakota cost benchmark with disclosed methodology and did not find one, so anyone quoting you a local cost per lead is extrapolating from national figures the same way this post does.
Once you have your own cost per lead and your own close rate, the published tables become a sanity check rather than a plan. When cost per lead holds steady while cost per booked job climbs, the ads are doing their part and the next gain is sitting where Attention hands off to Conversion, in how fast the phone gets answered and what happens on that call. Our Attention Generation Engine keeps those lines separate on purpose, at $3,500 to build and $2,000 a month to run, with ad spend paid direct to the platforms so you can see exactly what reaches the auction.
To size the number for your own business, start with a free consultation. We will work through your gross profit per job, your close rate, and the smallest pilot that would give you a real answer. Easy to start, easy to stop.
