What do Local Services Ads cost in the UK?
The short answer: you don’t pay for the ad, you pay for the enquiry. In the UK, Local Services Ads leads are commonly quoted at around £20 to £50 each, with competitive trades and expensive jobs sitting at the top of that range and simpler, lower-value work below it. You choose a weekly budget, Google charges per lead until it’s used, and there is no monthly fee to Google at all.
What you actually pay
- Per lead, not per click. A stranger can look at your ad all day for nothing.
- You set the weekly budget, so the worst case is capped and predictable.
- No management fee to Google. Any agency or consultant fee is separate.
- Bad leads can be disputed — but the refund rules tightened, which is the part most people get caught by.
What counts as a chargeable lead
You’re charged when a customer makes real contact: a phone call you answer and speak on, a voicemail, or a booking request through the ad. Someone tapping your name and reading your profile costs nothing.
One change matters more than any other for your bill. From 1 October 2026, some missed calls during your own opening hours can become chargeable if the caller stays on the line long enough. If nobody picks up the phone at 4pm on a Friday, that can now cost you money as well as ranking. Answering the phone has never been a more expensive habit to get wrong.
Why your cost per lead is higher or lower than the next firm’s
| What drives it | Effect on your cost per lead |
|---|---|
| Job value in your trade | Legal, roofing and specialist trades sit at the top of the range; domestic cleaning and simpler call-outs sit lower. |
| How many rivals are bidding locally | The main driver. A plumber in a city centre pays more than the same plumber twenty miles out. |
| Your review rating and volume | Better-reviewed businesses get chosen more often, so the same spend produces more jobs per pound. |
| How wide your service area is | Spread too thin and you buy leads from places you’d never travel to — the most common way money leaks. |
| The job types you’ve ticked | Leaving everything switched on invites enquiries you’d never quote for, and you pay for them anyway. |
| How fast you answer | Miss calls and you lose both the job and the ranking, which raises your real cost per won job. |
Disputing leads that were never going to be jobs
Google reviews charged leads for up to 30 days and uses its own models to spot invalid ones, so genuinely rubbish leads can be credited. What it no longer does is automatically refund leads that were outside your area or outside your job types — that is now treated as your setup being wrong, not Google’s mistake.
So the money is saved at the front end: honest service areas, only the job types you truly want, opening hours that match reality. Disputes are a safety net, not a strategy, and they expire, so somebody has to actually check the account each week.
How this compares with paying per click
With ordinary search ads you pay every time somebody clicks, whether they enquire or not. On a competitive local term you might spend £200 on clicks to get five enquiries — £40 an enquiry — and the ad sits below the Local Services block anyway. The maths often favours LSAs for local service work, but not always: see Local Services Ads vs Google Ads for the honest comparison, including the cases where search ads still win.
What a sensible starting budget looks like
Start low enough that a bad week doesn’t hurt and high enough to actually appear — for most small trades that means a weekly budget covering a handful of leads, then increasing it only once you know your conversion rate from lead to quote to job. If you win one in three and the average job is worth several hundred pounds, the arithmetic gets obvious quickly. If you win one in ten, the problem isn’t the ad, it’s what happens after the phone is answered.
And what management costs
Mine is a fixed fee, quoted after a free LSA check, with no ongoing contract — and I don’t take a percentage of your lead spend, because charging more when your costs rise is a strange way to stay honest. What matters more than my fee is the first month’s waste it prevents: wrong areas, wrong job types, unverified profile, nobody answering the phone.
One more thing worth knowing: you can’t get the badge that makes any of this work without passing Google’s checks first. That’s covered in Google Verified explained.
Before any of this applies, your category has to qualify — see which UK businesses can use Local Services Ads.
Quick answers
How much does a Local Services Ads lead cost in the UK?
Most UK trades are quoted somewhere around £20 to £50 per lead, with competitive trades and high-value jobs at the top of that range. You set the weekly budget, and Google charges per lead rather than per click.
Do I pay anything if nobody contacts me?
No. Impressions and profile views are free — you are charged when someone calls, leaves a voicemail or sends a booking request.
Can I get a refund on a bad Local Services Ads lead?
You can dispute leads, and Google reviews charged leads for up to 30 days. It no longer automatically credits leads from outside your service area or job types, so those have to be prevented in the setup.
Read next
Want someone to just handle it?
I run local service ads management for UK trades — setup, Google Verified checks and ongoing optimisation. Start with a free LSA check: I’ll tell you where you stand and whether it’s worth your money at all.