By Boiler Quotes Editorial Team · Updated 21 August 2026
The Range, and Why It Is So Wide
Ask five providers what a boiler lead costs and you will get five answers between roughly £20 and £70. That is not because some are cheap and some are greedy. It is because the word "lead" covers products that are not the same thing.
An exclusive installation enquiry, phone-verified, sold to one installer, sits at the top of that range. A shared service enquiry, sold to several firms, sits at the bottom. Both are honestly described as boiler leads. Neither price tells you anything on its own.
Before you compare prices, pin down what is actually being sold:
- Exclusive or shared. If an enquiry goes to one installer, you are buying the whole job. If it goes to four, you are buying a one-in-four chance and the price should reflect that.
- Installation or service. A new boiler is a £2,500 to £4,000 job. A service is £80 to £120. Paying the same for both makes no sense, and any provider charging a flat rate across the two is overcharging you for one of them.
- Fresh or aged. An enquiry submitted twenty minutes ago and an enquiry submitted last month are different products sold under the same word.
- Verified or raw. Some providers ring the customer before passing the enquiry on. Some pass on whatever the form collected.
What Actually Moves the Price
Exclusivity. This is the single biggest factor. A lead sold to one installer costs several times a lead sold to five, and it should. What matters is not the headline price but the cap: a provider who tells you the maximum number of firms an enquiry goes to is giving you enough to work out your odds. A provider who will not say is asking you to bid blind.
Job type. Installation enquiries cost more than service and repair enquiries everywhere, because the job behind them is worth more. On BoilerQuotes leads start from £8 + VAT and an installation costs several times a service call, which is roughly the ratio you should expect anywhere.
Postcode competition. Enquiry volume is not spread evenly and neither is installer demand. Dense urban postcodes with several firms buying tend to price higher than rural ones.
Qualification. Every filter applied before the enquiry reaches you costs the provider money and shows up in the price: homeowner confirmation, phone verification, job-type screening. A cheaper unfiltered lead is not cheaper if a third of them are tenants who cannot authorise work.
Buying boiler leads? BoilerQuotes sells enquiries from its own site and ads from £8 + VAT, priced by job type. No membership fee and no contract. See how it works for installers.
The Maths That Actually Matters
Cost per lead is the wrong number to optimise. Cost per job won is the number that decides whether this works, and it is easy to calculate once you know your conversion rate.
Take an installer converting one in five installation enquiries into a fitted boiler, buying at £40 a lead:
| Figure | |
|---|---|
| Cost per lead | £40 |
| Conversion rate | 1 in 5 |
| Leads bought per job won | 5 |
| Acquisition cost per job | £200 |
| Typical install value | £2,500 to £4,000 |
| Gross margin at 30% | £750 to £1,200 |
| Margin after acquisition | £550 to £1,000 |
At those numbers the acquisition cost is roughly 5% to 8% of the job value, which is comfortably inside what most trades will accept for work that arrives without any marketing effort.
Now run it at one in ten. Ten leads per job, £400 of acquisition cost, and the same margin. Still workable on a £4,000 job, tight on a £2,500 one. Run it at one in twenty and the model is broken regardless of the lead price.
The conclusion most installers reach the wrong way round: your conversion rate matters more than the price per lead. Halving the lead price saves you £100 a job at one in five. Doubling your conversion rate saves you the same £100 and doubles your throughput. Answering the phone quickly is worth more than negotiating a discount.
Working Out Your Own Break-Even
The most you can sensibly pay per lead is your gross margin per job, multiplied by the share of leads you convert, multiplied by whatever fraction of that margin you are willing to spend on acquisition.
An installer with £900 of margin on a typical job, converting one in five, spending at most 10% of margin on getting the work, can pay up to £18 a lead before it stops making sense. The same installer converting one in three can pay £30. The same installer converting one in three on £1,200 jobs can pay £40.
Run that calculation before you talk to anyone. It turns "is £40 a lot?" into a question with an answer.
Red Flags
Some things reliably signal that a lead is worth less than the price on it.
- Aged data. An enquiry is worth the most in the first hour and very little after a week. If a provider will not tell you how old an enquiry is when it reaches you, assume the worst.
- Resold third-party data. Some providers buy enquiry data from aggregators rather than generating it. The customer did not ask to hear from you, does not recognise the brand, and often does not remember filling anything in.
- Uncapped sharing. "Shared" without a number is not a description, it is an evasion. Four installers is a marketplace. Ten is a raffle.
- Contract lock-ins. A twelve month minimum on a lead product is a way of stopping you leaving when quality drops. A provider confident in the leads does not need one.
- No credit policy. Dead numbers and duplicates happen to every provider. What separates them is whether you get your money back. Ask for the policy in writing, and check the window: a seven day window is workable, a forty-eight hour one is not.
- Vague qualification. "Pre-qualified" means nothing by itself. Ask exactly which questions are asked and which answers are verified.
Comparing Like With Like
When you are weighing two providers, get both to answer the same five questions and the comparison does itself:
- What is the maximum number of installers this enquiry goes to?
- Is the price different for installations and service calls?
- How old is the enquiry when it reaches me?
- What are the exact grounds for a credit, and how long do I have to claim?
- Is there a minimum term, a monthly fee, or a minimum spend?
A provider who answers all five plainly is one you can do the maths on. A provider who talks around them is telling you something.
For a view of who is in the market and how their models differ, see our round-up of boiler lead providers in the UK. And for the wider picture, boiler lead generation for installers sets out every channel available to you, bought leads being only one of them.
BoilerQuotes runs on the same maths set out above: a fixed price per enquiry, a cap of three installers on any one job, and every enquiry called and verified before it is passed on, so you are not paying to find out whether the number works. Check coverage in your postcodes.
