Plumbing Leads in the UK: What They Cost and Where They Come From

A plumbing lead in the UK costs between roughly £5 and £40 if you buy it, and the same enquiry is sold to somewhere between three and twenty other plumbers. That second number matters more than the first, and no platform puts it on the pricing page.

This is what each of the big platforms charges, what a won job actually costs once you account for the ones you lose, and the honest answer on free leads. Every figure carries a source and a date, and all of them live in my UK trade lead cost tracker, which I update quarterly.

What the platforms charge

Platform	How you pay	Cost per lead	Contract	Publishes prices?
MyBuilder	Per shortlist	£5–£35 typical, £7 official floor	None	Partial
Bark	Credits	£9–£36+ (£1.80 a credit)	None on standard credits	Partial
Checkatrade	Monthly subscription	£16–£37.50 derived from real quotes	12 months fixed	Partial
Rated People	Closed to trades since 16 September 2026	Jobs now go to Checkatrade members	Memberships ended	Not applicable
TrustATrader	Annual membership	No per-lead fee	12 months, paid in advance	No

Two of the four still trading will not give you a real number until you are on a call. TrustATrader’s join page has no price on it at all. Checkatrade shows “from £59 a month” but the real quote for your trade and postcode only appears once you are inside the sign-up flow.

That is worth naming for what it is. A price that only exists on a sales call is a price set by what the salesperson thinks you will pay.

Rated People is in the table for a reason. The company went into liquidation on 16 September 2026, every trade membership was closed, and Checkatrade Group bought the brand and website. A homeowner can still post a job there, but it is a Checkatrade member who gets it. My guide to Rated People’s closure covers what former members should do.

Cost per lead is the wrong number

You do not win every lead you buy. Reported conversion on shared platforms runs at about one job per five to eight paid leads, so the number that matters is what a won job costs.

Platform	Cost per won job
MyBuilder	~£25–£280
Bark	~£45–£288
Checkatrade	~£95–£375

Take a real example. One tradesman was quoted £150 a month by Checkatrade for an estimated four leads, with each lead also going to three other contractors. That is £37.50 a lead before he had quoted for anything, and at a 1-in-5 win rate it is roughly £187 in fees for every job that lands.

On a boiler installation clearing £600 gross profit, that works. On a £90 call-out to reseat a toilet, you have paid twice the job value to be told no.

The question is never whether the platforms produce work. They do. It is whether your gross profit per job clears the cost per won job, and whether it still clears it in a quiet month when the subscription bills anyway.

Where “free plumbing leads” actually come from

People search for this constantly, so here is the straight answer.

No platform gives away leads. What gets advertised as free is one of three things: a trial period, a credit-back guarantee if you win nothing from your first pack, or a listing tier that carries no lead stream at all. Checkatrade’s £30 Approved plan is that third kind, a reputation listing with no enquiries attached.

Here is what each “free” offer amounted to when I checked on 30 September 2026.

What is advertised	What it is
Checkatrade “first month FREE”	A discount on a 12-month fixed membership. You are signed up for the other eleven
Checkatrade Free tier, £0 a month	A listing. Even the £30 Approved plan above it has no lead stream
Checkatrade Opportunities Board	Free to browse. Each lead costs credits to unlock, at a price Checkatrade does not publish
MyBuilder, free to join	True, and you pay from £7 each time a homeowner shortlists you
Bark, leads “arrive free”	You see the request for free and pay credits at £1.80 each to get the contact details

Free plumbing leads do exist. They come from two places, and you own both.

Your Google Business Profile. “Plumbers near me” takes 90,500 UK searches a month (Google Ads data, July 2026) and returns a map pack of three businesses above everything else. Appearing there costs nothing. Most plumbers’ profiles are half finished, which is why the bar in your town is lower than you would guess.

Your own website. A page that ranks for “blocked drain [your town]” sends you enquiries that nobody else receives a copy of. It costs time to build and nothing per lead afterwards.

Neither is instant, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. Map pack movement usually shows in two to three months. Service pages take three to six.

Buying plumbing leads: who actually sells them

Search “plumbing leads for sale” or “buy plumbing leads” and you meet a second kind of seller. These are lead generation companies, and they work differently from the directories.

A directory owns a brand that homeowners visit. A plumbing lead company owns adverts and websites built to look like a local plumber, takes the enquiry, and sells it on.

They sell in three ways:

• Shared leads. The same enquiry goes to several plumbers, as it does on the directories, usually for less money per lead.
• Exclusive leads. One plumber gets the enquiry, and the price reflects it.
• Pay per call or per booked job. You pay when the phone rings for long enough to count, or when a job is booked.

What they rarely do is publish a UK price. The one UK agency I found ranking for these searches describes its leads as “priced per booked job” and gives no number. The guides that do quote figures are American, at $35 to $200 a lead (Hero, 2026), and I would not convert those into pounds and call it research.

So go in with questions instead of a benchmark:

1. Where was this lead generated, and can I see the advert or the page?
2. Is it sold to anyone else, now or later?
3. What counts as a valid lead, and what is refunded?
4. Is there a minimum spend or a minimum term?
5. Who owns the phone number and the website the customer used?

The fifth question matters most. If a company has spent a year ranking a website for “emergency plumber” in your town and renting you the calls, the day you stop paying, those calls go to the plumber down the road.

The part nobody prices: the lead is not yours

Every paid plumbing lead is sold more than once.

MyBuilder shares each job with three to five trades and says so. Bark sells the same enquiry to whoever spends credits on it. Checkatrade publishes no figure at all, though third-party analyses report ten to twenty-plus members per enquiry, and one Screwfix Community member was told he would be competing with 23 other businesses in his category and area.

This changes what you are actually buying. It is not an enquiry, it is a place in a queue, and the queue is won by whoever picks up first. That suits a firm with someone on the phone all day. It punishes the plumber who is under a sink until six.

It also sets the price of the job. When four plumbers ring the same homeowner within an hour, the conversation becomes about who is cheapest, because nothing else separates you at that point.

What the same money buys if you rank

Advertisers currently bid up to £35.41 for one click on “emergency plumber” and up to £48.84 on “leak detection” (Google Ads data, July 2026). A click is not a lead, so the real cost of a customer through paid search is several times that.

Those bids are useful anyway, because they tell you what a plumbing enquiry is worth to someone doing the maths properly. The organic results and the map pack sit above and below those ads on the same page, and they charge nothing per click.

Spend £150 a month on a directory for a year and you have spent £1,800 on enquiries that stop the day you stop paying. Spend a similar amount once on pages that rank and they keep sending work in year two, year three and after you have forgotten you built them. My guide to SEO for plumbers covers how that gets built, and the plumbing keywords list shows which pages are worth building first.

I sell that second thing, so weigh my bias accordingly. Then run your own numbers, because the arithmetic works whoever does it.

If you are going to use a platform anyway

Sometimes you need work this month, and that is a fair reason to buy leads. A few things worth knowing before you sign.

Start with MyBuilder. No subscription, no contract, no minimum term. A bad month costs you nothing, which makes it the only one of the four you can genuinely test rather than commit to. The MyBuilder cost guide has every published figure, and the MyBuilder review covers what plumbers and other trades report once they are paying shortlist fees.

Check the fee on every single job. MyBuilder fees scale with job value and one member filmed shortlist charges of £540 and £940 on large projects. The number is shown before you respond, and it is never adjusted afterwards.

Never sign a twelve-month term to test a channel. Checkatrade and TrustATrader both lock you in for a year, and TrustATrader takes the whole fee up front. Members posting in 2026 describe being held to the full Checkatrade term after lead quality dropped. My Checkatrade review covers who it works for, and there is a separate cancellation guide if you are already in one.

Answer within ten minutes or do not bother. On a shared lead, speed is the entire strategy. If you cannot answer during the working day, you are buying leads for whoever can.

Bank the reviews on Google, not on the platform. Every review you collect on a directory profile disappears when the membership ends. Ask the same customer for a Google review and it works for you for years, on a profile nobody can take away.

Run your own figures through the break-even calculator on the lead cost tracker before the sales call, so you are negotiating with a number rather than a feeling.

Want to know what your patch looks like before you spend another £35 on a shared lead? I audit trade businesses’ local visibility for free: a grid showing where you rank across your area, who is above you, and the three changes worth making first. See where you rank and I’ll run yours.