Google Local Services Ads Cost Calculator

Start from the jobs you want, not the budget you guess

Local Services Ads charge per lead, not per click, so a budget is really a lead target wearing a dollar sign. Put in the work you want to win and this gives you the weekly budget to ask for, the monthly cap Google will actually apply, and what a booked job ends up costing.

Picking a trade fills in a published figure below. It is a starting point from somebody else's clients, not your price.
Use your own number if you have one. It beats every benchmark on this page.
Actual jobs on the calendar, not leads.
If you do not know it, 44% is the call book rate SearchLight measured across 888 contractors. Your own number is better.
What one booked job invoices, on average.
What you keep after doing the work, before overhead.
Share of your contacts that are the same customer coming back. Google does not charge twice inside 15 days, so this lowers your bill. Leave at 0 if unsure.
Share of spend Google gives back automatically as low-quality credits. There is no published benchmark for this. Leave at 0 unless you have your own figure.

Four things Google documents that most LSA calculators get wrong

Each of these changes the answer. Every quote was read from Google's own help pages on 6 November 2026 and is linked.

The mechanicWhat Google actually says
The monthly cap is not four weeks "The exact formula for the monthly max is average weekly budget x 30.4 ÷ 7." That is 4.34 weeks, so a $500 weekly budget caps at $2,171, not $2,000. You can exceed the weekly figure; you cannot exceed the monthly one.
Google: How to edit your budget
The same customer is not charged twice inside 15 days "Once a lead is charged, any follow-up calls or messages with that customer are not charged again, provided there is interaction within 15 days." If a chunk of your contacts are people calling back, you are buying fewer leads than you think.
Google: How leads work
The 20 second rule applies only to missed calls "The 20-second rule applies only to unanswered (missed) calls. If you or someone at your business answers the phone (even after 20 seconds of ringing) you aren't charged based on the ring time." Answered calls are judged on the conversation instead.
Google: How leads work
Credits do not reduce your invoice Disputes were replaced by automatic credits. "In most cases, credits will be applied to your account balance within 30 days. Note that the original lead charge will still appear on your invoice." Credits are also unavailable for health care, tax specialists, and advertisers in the EEA.
Google: About automated lead credits

Two things that are no longer true, and are still on most LSA pagesChanged

"Google Guaranteed" and "Google Screened" no longer exist
Both badges were consolidated into a single Google Verified badge, and Google says it is "discontinuing the Money Back Guarantee associated with the Google Guarantee badge." Consumer reimbursement closed for services booked before 7 December 2025. The old help pages for both badges now return "Sorry, this page can't be found." If a page is still selling you on the Google Guarantee, it has not been checked this year.
Google: About the Google Verified badge
Proximity is not a documented ranking factor
It is absent from Google's ad rankings page, and Google's Ads Liaison has said "We've seen that proximity of a business' location is often not a key indicator of relevancy." What Google does document: your bid, your responsiveness to enquiries, review rating and count, response time, photos, completed verification, and whether you accept message and booking leads as well as calls.
Google: About ad rankings

Where the benchmark numbers come from, and why yours will differ

Google publishes no cost-per-lead figures at all. Every number you see quoted online comes from a vendor's own book of business. Two of them publish a method, so those are the two used here. Both are small and neither is independent. They are prefills, not prices.

SourceWhat it isBasis
SearchLight Digital
February 2026 benchmark
 888 home-services contractors, 1,774 campaigns, $6.72M spend, 126,650 leads, one month. Spend-weighted. Blended cost per lead $53. Gross, before credits. Its own page flags that some trade cells rest on very few accounts.
99 Calls
LSA cost estimator
 Charged-lead data pulled from the Google Ads API across its own client campaigns, three months for most trades. Publishes median and 10th to 90th percentile per trade. Net, credits excluded. Between 2 and 15 businesses per trade, which is a very small sample.
The two are not comparable like for like, because one is before credits and the other after. And the figures move: a widely republished plumbing figure of $66.17 reads $84.79 on the source today, about 28% higher. Treat any hardcoded benchmark, including the ones on this page, as going stale. Also worth knowing: the "$66.69 average cost per lead" repeated across dozens of LSA pages is not an LSA number at all. It is an all-industry average for Google search advertising that has been quietly relabelled.

The arithmetic is shown above under Show the arithmetic so you can disagree with it line by line. Google's billing mechanics are quoted from Google's own documentation, read on 6 November 2026 and linked at each point. Cost-per-lead figures are other companies' client data, attributed with their sample size and basis. Nothing here is a quote, a guarantee, or a prediction of what Google will charge you.

Is that cost per job right for your trade?

The benchmark cost per lead behind this varies a lot by trade and by market, so the figure above is a starting point rather than a quote. If what you are actually paying looks nothing like it, tell me what you are seeing and I will check it against what the account is really doing.

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