Home Services Benchmarks: The Numbers a Healthy Trades Business Hits

Every contractor eventually asks the same quiet question: am I normal? The trade press is full of tactics, but very little of it answers with numbers. Here is what the most credible public data says a healthy home-services business actually hits — and, just as important, where the widely-quoted figures are solid and where they're guesswork.

• $90.92 Average Google Ads cost per lead, Home & Home Improvement¹
• 42% Typical call booking rate across the trades²
• 61% Of inbound calls that reach a live person³

Cost per lead: what it takes to make the phone ring

Start with a neutral, non-vendor anchor. WordStream's 2025 benchmarks for "Home & Home Improvement" on Google Ads — drawn from 16,446 US campaigns running April 2024 through March 2025 — show an average cost per lead of $90.92, a 7.33% conversion rate, and a $7.85 average click.¹ That's the paid-search baseline; your number moves with trade and intent. Emergency plumbing and HVAC clicks run more expensive than a routine maintenance query, and branded search is a fraction of non-branded. Treat $90 as the gravitational center, not your target.

The more important point: a lead is not a booked job. What you pay to generate the call only matters once you know how many of those calls turn into work on the calendar — which is the next benchmark, and the one most businesses never measure.

Call booking rate: the metric that decides everything downstream

This is where benchmarking gets useful. ServiceTitan's analysis of more than 3,000 trade businesses found a typical call booking rate of about 42% — meaning well over half of inbound opportunity calls never turn into a booked job.² It varies by trade, and far more by the size and discipline of the shop.

The answered call: a leak hiding in plain sight

Booking rate has a precondition nobody prices in: someone has to pick up. Across home services, Invoca's analysis of 60M+ calls found only 61% of callers reach a live person, with answer rates ranging from 54% to 69% by segment.³ Every unanswered call is a lead you already paid to generate and a competitor's opening. It never shows up in a cost-per-lead report — which is exactly why the lead number can look healthy while the schedule doesn't fill.

Average ticket: real, but don't trust a single number

The honest way to benchmark your ticket is against yourself: your average revenue per completed job, trended month over month, segmented by repair vs. install and by trade. That number you can trust, because it comes from your own invoices — and it's the one that actually moves when your techs get better at presenting options.

Marketing spend: a sensible range, not a rule

There's no primary source for home-services marketing budgets either, but the vendor consensus is consistent enough to use as a guardrail: most established businesses spend roughly 5–10% of revenue on marketing, with aggressive-growth and brand-new operators spending well into the teens (industry estimate). The more useful question isn't how much — it's whether you can attribute what each channel returns in booked, completed, billed work. That attribution is what separates a budget from a guess.

Reviews: the quiet multiplier on every other number

Reputation isn't a soft metric in home services — it's the top of the funnel. BrightLocal's 2025 Local Consumer Review Survey found 83% of consumers use Google to read reviews of local businesses, and most check more than one site before calling.⁴ A steady flow of recent, responded-to reviews lowers your effective cost per lead across every channel, because more of the people who see you actually dial. It's a leading indicator dressed up as a vanity metric.

The one-screen benchmark

Pulling it together — and flagging the source quality of each line so you know what to trust: