Trades & Home Services Google Ads Statistics 2026: CPCs, Lead Costs and LSA Changes

Paid search is the one channel where a trade business can buy a phone call outright. Which is why the benchmark question gets asked constantly: what should this cost?

The answer in 2026 depends on the trade far more than on the advertiser. Roofing leads cost roughly five times what cleaning leads cost, on the same platform, in the same country, measured by the same agency. Averaging across "home services" hides that entirely.

Two things shifted this year. Google quietly killed the money-back guarantee behind its Local Services Ads product, and Performance Max became the default way Google spends local budgets.

Everything below comes from a source page we opened and read. Where the best available data is American, or a year old, that is said in the sentence.

Key trades and home services Google Ads statistics for 2026

• Average CPC across all industries is $5.42, with a 6.64% CTR, an 8.18% conversion rate and a $66.69 cost per lead, according to LocaliQ's 2026 search advertising benchmarks [1]
• Home & Home Improvement runs at $8.33 CPC and $90.92 cost per lead, well above the cross-industry average, on the same LocaliQ dataset [1]
• Roofing and gutters is the most expensive home services vertical at $228.15 per lead, against $46.99 for cleaning and maid services, per LocaliQ's analysis of 3,211 US home services campaigns [2]
• Painting carries the highest click cost in the trades at $13.74, followed by electricians at $12.18 and plumbing at $10.49 [2]
• Cost per lead rose for 69% of home services advertisers, by an average of 10.51%, whilst conversion rates fell in 10 of 16 subcategories [2]
• Google's money-back guarantee attached to the Google Guaranteed badge has been discontinued, with consumer reimbursement requests only accepted for services booked before 7 December 2025, per Google's own documentation [3]
• Local Services Ads message leads, booking leads and automatic lead credits are available only in the United States and Canada, and lead credits are explicitly unavailable to EMEA advertisers, according to Google [4][5]
• Local Services Ads average around $60 per lead, below the $66.69 search average, on LocaliQ's figures [6]
• Performance Max click volume grew 15.7% year on year whilst Search fell 3.8%, and PMax ROAS dropped 4.53%, across 21,425 accounts analysed by Optmyzr [7]
• 91.45% of accounts had exact keyword overlap between their Search and Performance Max campaigns, on Optmyzr's sample of 503 accounts [8]
• Google recorded a 7.57% invalid traffic rate, the lowest of any major platform, across 2.7 billion clicks analysed by Lunio [9]
• UK searches for "boiler repair" ran at 7,539 in December 2025 against 2,620 in June 2026, a 2.9x swing, on Ahrefs modelled volume data [10]

What does a click cost in home services Google Ads in 2026?

Around $8.33 for the broad Home & Home Improvement category, against a $5.42 cross-industry average. Individual trades range from roughly $5 to nearly $14 a click, and the spread inside home services is wider than the gap between home services and everything else.

LocaliQ's 2026 benchmarks, published in June 2026 and drawn from thousands of Google Ads and Microsoft Ads accounts, put Home & Home Improvement at $8.33 CPC, 6.47% CTR, 8.05% conversion rate and $90.92 cost per lead [1]. Attorneys and legal services, the nearest adjacent lead-generation category, sat at $9.87 CPC and $131.63 per lead [1].

The vertical-level detail comes from LocaliQ's separate home services study, based on 3,211 US search campaigns running between 1 April 2024 and 21 March 2025 [2].

Source: LocaliQ, 2025 home services search advertising benchmarks, 3,211 US campaigns [2].

Read that table by column and CPC turns out to be close to meaningless on its own. Painting costs more per click than plumbing but far less per lead, because it converts at 10.80% rather than 7.63%. Roofing has a cheaper click than painting and the worst cost per lead in the set, because only 3.70% of clicks become an enquiry.

Which trades have the most expensive leads, and why?

Roofing, replacement windows and general contracting. All three share a pattern: high job value, long consideration, and search terms that pull in research traffic alongside genuine buyers.

Roofing and gutters at $228.15 per lead is nearly five times the cleaning and maid figure of $46.99 [2]. That is not a failure of roofing advertisers. A roof replacement involves a quote, a comparison and often an insurance conversation, whereas an end-of-tenancy clean is close to a transaction. Cleaning converts at 17.65% against roofing's 3.70% [2].

So a roofer with a £228 equivalent lead cost and a £9,000 average job is in a far better position than a cleaner with a £47 lead and a £180 job. Almost nobody publishes those two numbers together.

Are Google Ads getting cheaper or more expensive for trades?

More expensive per click, marginally better per lead across the whole market, and worse for home services specifically. The two datasets pull in different directions.

LocaliQ reported that across all industries, "cost per lead decreased overall for the first time in five years" in the 2026 benchmarks, whilst CPC rose over the year [1]. That is the first genuinely good headline for advertisers since 2021.

Home services did not share in it. In the year to March 2025, LocaliQ found CPC rose for 75% of home services advertisers, cost per lead rose for 69% of them by an average of 10.51%, and conversion rate fell in 10 of 16 subcategories by an average of 14.96% [2]. Click-through rate was the bright spot, rising for 88% of businesses by an average of 13.95% [2].

Rising CTR alongside falling conversion rate is a worrying signature. It usually means ads are getting better at attracting clicks whilst the traffic mix gets looser, which is what happens as broad match and automated targeting take more of the budget.

Optmyzr's Q1 2026 benchmark report, covering 21,425 Google Ads accounts across five quarters, shows the same shape at platform level. Impressions fell 11% year on year, CTR rose from 1.83% to 2.22%, conversion rate slipped from 6.26% to 6.20% and CPA rose from $12.70 to $13.27 [7].

Fewer impressions, better click rates, worse economics.

How do Local Services Ads compare with standard search ads?

Local Services Ads are pay-per-lead rather than pay-per-click, sit above the standard text ads, and come in around $60 a lead on the one published estimate.

Google's documentation is explicit: "A bid is the most that you'd pay for a lead... You only pay when you get a lead" [11]. Three bidding modes are offered, Maximise Leads, Target Cost Per Lead and Max Per Lead, with Google recommending a minimum budget equivalent to ten leads a week [11].

LocaliQ puts the average Local Services Ads cost per lead at "about $60", below the $66.69 search ads average [6]. Treat that as one agency's estimate, because Google publishes no cost data of its own.

The real difference is who absorbs the risk. On search ads you pay for the click and hope it converts. On Local Services Ads you pay for the contact, which shifts lead quality risk onto you.

Google's lead credits system is meant to handle that, using machine learning to avoid charging for invalid leads and to issue retrospective credits [5]. Google has also withdrawn credits for leads marked "job type not serviced" and "geo not serviced", two of the most common complaints [5].

Is Local Services Ads worth using in the UK?

It is available, but it is a materially reduced product compared with the American version, and the guarantee change has removed its main consumer-facing selling point.

Google lists Local Services Ads availability across Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States [12]. The UK product page covers plumbing, electrical, HVAC, roofing, window cleaning and contracting, plus estate agents and several legal specialisms [13].

Two restrictions matter for British advertisers. Google's leads documentation states that message leads and booking leads are "US and Canada only" [4]. Automatic lead credits are unavailable to "health care verticals, tax specialists or advertisers in EMEA", which includes the UK [5].

So a UK trade running Local Services Ads gets phone leads, pays per lead, and has no automated mechanism for reclaiming the cost of a bad one.

Then there is the badge. Google has confirmed it is "discontinuing the money-back guarantee associated with the Google Guarantee badge", with consumer reimbursement requests accepted only for services booked before 7 December 2025, and a single Google Verified badge replacing the old Google Guaranteed and Google Screened marks [3].

That is a significant quiet change. The guarantee was the thing that made the placement feel different to a homeowner. What remains is a verification badge, closer to what Checkatrade or TrustATrader already offer, without the financial backstop. Google's own UK marketing page was still using "Google Guaranteed" language when we checked in August 2026 [13].

How much does seasonality move trades search demand?

Enormously, and asymmetrically. Heating searches roughly triple between summer and midwinter whilst general emergency terms move far less. Bid strategies built on a rolling 30-day window will always be a season behind.

Source: Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, GB, modelled monthly volumes, retrieved August 2026 [10].

Ahrefs modelled data for Great Britain shows "boiler repair" peaking at 7,539 searches in December 2025 and bottoming at 2,620 in June 2026 [10]. "Emergency plumber" peaked at 10,670 in December 2025 against a June 2026 low of 6,795 [10].

The difference between the curves matters. Boiler repair is almost purely weather-driven. Emergency plumber has a floor, because burst pipes and blocked drains happen all year. For a heating engineer, a December cost per lead is not comparable to a June one, and the annual average describes no month that actually happened.

Ahrefs CPC estimates for the same UK terms are below, modelled rather than observed.

Source: Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, country GB, retrieved 7 August 2026. CPC reported in USD [10].

Is Performance Max working for local service businesses?

Volume is moving into Performance Max whether or not advertisers chose it, and returns are drifting down as it grows. Overlap with existing Search campaigns is close to universal.

Optmyzr's Q1 2026 data across 21,425 accounts shows Performance Max click volume up 15.7% year on year with CTR up 30.2%, whilst CPC rose 5.66% and ROAS fell 4.53% [7]. Search volume fell 3.8% over the same period, with CTR up 14.7% and ROAS up 2.47% [7].

So Performance Max is taking share from Search, getting more clicks per impression and returning less per pound. For a one-location advertiser on a small budget, that trade is harder to justify than for a national retailer.

Optmyzr's February 2025 study found exact keyword overlap between Search and Performance Max in 91.45% of 503 accounts, affecting 56.29% of 5,768 Search campaigns, and search term overlap in 97.26% of 511 accounts [8].

Where keywords overlapped, Search beat Performance Max on CTR in 28.37% of cases against 15.98% the other way, and on conversion rate in 18.91% against 6.17% [8]. Most comparisons showed no significant difference, but where there was one, Search usually won.

Optmyzr's spend tiers matter to trades, most of whom sit in the smallest bracket. Accounts spending under $10,000 a month returned 387.8% ROAS in Q1 2026 against 565.8% for the $10,000 to $50,000 tier [7]. Automation rewards scale.

How much trades ad spend is actually wasted?

Less than the click fraud industry implies, but not nothing. The best-sourced figure puts Google's invalid traffic rate at 7.57%, the lowest of any major ad platform.

Lunio's 2026 Global Invalid Traffic report, based on 2.7 billion clicks, reports the following rates by platform [9].

Source: Lunio, 2026 Global Invalid Traffic Report, 2.7 billion clicks [9].

Lunio separately claims that "on average, 8.51% of your ad budget is wasted" [14]. Both figures come from a vendor selling invalid traffic filtering, so treat them as the high end of a plausible range.

More useful is Lunio's note that "campaign types that widen reach, such as Performance Max, inherit the risk profiles of higher-IVT inventory" [9]. If a local budget is migrating into Performance Max, some of it is migrating onto display and video inventory with worse traffic quality than search.

For a trade business the practical waste is rarely fraud anyway. It is out-of-area clicks, job types you do not service and DIY researchers. Google's decision to stop crediting "geo not serviced" leads pushes that cost back to the advertiser [5].

What do AI Overviews and AI Mode ads mean for local advertisers?

Ads are appearing inside AI answers, Google has confirmed it will place them against queries without obvious commercial intent, and there is still no published performance data for the placement.

Google VP Vidhya Srinivasan said at Google Marketing Live that the company "can take a search that doesn't have obvious commercial intent, but still understand that connecting the user to a product or business is the most helpful next step" [14]. That describes a broader ad surface, not a narrower one.

No figure on click-through rate, cost per click or conversion rate for ads inside AI Overviews or AI Mode has been published, by Google or by any independent panel, at the time of writing.

For trades this cuts both ways. An AI answer to "why is my boiler making a banging noise" is a genuinely useful place for a heating engineer's ad, and a query that would never have justified a bid before. It is also a placement where the user gets their answer without needing anyone.

The practical step now is making sure call tracking separates AI-surface traffic from standard search.

How to read these numbers

LocaliQ's benchmark figures repeat. The value $129.02 appears as the cost per lead for both plumbing and heating, $90.92 as both the home services average and the 2026 Home & Home Improvement figure, and $66.69 as both the all-industry cost per lead and the window cleaning figure [1][2]. These are medians snapped to a shared grid, not independent measurements. Do not read small differences between adjacent rows as meaningful.

The two LocaliQ datasets cover different periods. The vertical breakdown is April 2024 to March 2025; the cross-industry table is 2026 data published in June 2026 [1][2]. They are not a clean year-on-year pair.

Ahrefs monthly volumes are modelled, not observed. The 2026 figures in the seasonality series are near-identical to the 2025 ones, January 2025 at 7,736 against January 2026 at 7,741, so the model projects a seasonal curve forward rather than measuring each month fresh [10]. Use it for shape, not absolute levels.

Ahrefs CPC estimates and account-level CPCs disagree badly. Ahrefs puts UK "roof repair" at $0.40 whilst LocaliQ's US account data puts roofing at $10.70 a click [10][2]. Some of that is a real UK versus US gap. Most of it is that keyword-tool CPC is modelled across all matched queries whilst a live account bids on a narrower, more commercial subset.

Everything with a dollar sign is American. No equivalent UK home services benchmark exists from anyone with account-level access, which is a real gap. And the invalid traffic figures come from a company selling invalid traffic prevention. That does not make them wrong, but the incentive runs one way.

What this means going into 2027

Cost per lead is the only benchmark worth tracking, and it needs to sit beside average job value. A roofer and a cleaner reading the same "home services" average are both misled.

The guarantee's removal changes the pitch for Local Services Ads. The badge now signals verification rather than protection, putting it level with UK trade directories rather than above them. Expect the product to compete on lead price from here, not on trust.

UK advertisers should assume the product stays behind the US version. No message leads, no booking leads, no automatic lead credits [4][5].

Performance Max will keep absorbing budget. Search still beats it on conversion rate where the two overlap in Optmyzr's data, so keeping a properly negatived Search campaign running is worth the management time [8].

Seasonality deserves a plan rather than a rolling average. Winter demand for heating work is close to triple the summer level, and a bid strategy learning on a 30-day window will underbid every October and overbid every May [10]. If you want help working out how findable your trades or home services business really is in search and AI answers, you can book a call with me.