How to get roofing leads: buying them versus building your own

First, the word. This guide is about roofing leads in the sense of job enquiries from homeowners, not lead as in the metal on a valley or a chimney flashing. Google mixes the two up, which is why the questions it shows next to this search include the price of a lead roof.

Second, the short version. There are three ways to get roofing work from the internet: buy leads one at a time, pay a directory to list you, or build your own pipeline from a Google Business Profile, reviews and a website. The first two produce enquiries quickly and for ever at a price. The third costs time and some money up front, then keeps producing without a per-lead fee. Most roofers end up using more than one, and the mistake is not which one you pick; it is paying per lead for years without building anything that would let you stop.

What bought roofing leads cost in the UK

Six of the ten pages Google shows a UK roofer for "roofing leads" are companies selling them. Only one of those puts a price in its headline, so we fetched each vendor's public page on 28 August 2026 and wrote down what it actually says. Where a vendor publishes no figure, the table says so rather than guessing.

Vendor	How you pay	Public price (checked 28 August 2026)	Shared or exclusive	When you stop paying
Lead Pronto	Per lead, no contract or retainer; or per booked appointment	From £20 a lead; from £130 a booked appointment, depending on area and criteria	Not stated on the page	Leads stop
leads.work	Per lead, or a fixed weekly subscription; you see the lead before you accept it	Most roofing leads £10–£35	Shared, usually with no more than three roofers in the area	Leads stop
Get Work	Monthly subscription with ad spend included, month to month	£600, £900, £1,200 or £1,500 a month plus VAT, including £300 to £750 of ad spend	Exclusive to one roofer per location	Leads stop
Leads Everyday	Not published; you call for a quote	Not published	Exclusive, "never shared with competitors"	Leads stop
MyJobQuote	Per lead you choose to accept, with packages; a month's free trial	Not published	Not stated on the page	Leads stop; your profile and reviews stay on their site
Rated People	One monthly membership, unlimited leads	Not published on the page	Shared: no more than three tradespeople can buy the same lead	Leads stop; your profile and reviews stay on their site
Bark	A fee for each introduction	Not published	Not stated	Leads stop
Checkatrade, MyBuilder, TrustATrader	Membership; pay when the homeowner shortlists you; capped membership per area	Not quoted here; the dated figures are in our guides on whether Checkatrade is worth it and Checkatrade alternatives	Varies by platform	Leads stop; reviews and profile stay with the platform

Two things stand out. Rated People says on its own page that it is "perfect for tradespeople who regularly quote under £4k", which tells you the kind of job the shared-lead platforms are built around. And Get Work's subscription tiers each include roughly half the fee as ad spend, which is a useful reminder of what you are buying from every vendor: somebody else's Google and Facebook advertising, with a margin on top.

Cost per lead is not cost per job

The number the vendors advertise is the cost of an enquiry. The number you need is the cost of a booked job, and the gap between them is where the money goes.

Take Lead Pronto's own figures. Its page quotes a 15 per cent lead-to-appointment rate. At £20 a lead, that is roughly seven leads and £140 in fees for one appointment, before you have driven anywhere or priced anything, and you still have to win the quote. On the pay-per-appointment option the arithmetic is simpler, £130 per appointment, but the page says the price depends on area and on what counts as an appointment, so ask.

Shared leads add a second step. If the same £10 to £35 enquiry goes to three roofers, two of them have paid for a job that went elsewhere. Win one in three and every job you book has cost you three leads; win one in five and it is five. That is why "cheap roofing leads" is the wrong search: a £15 lead shared three ways is often dearer than a £30 lead nobody else gets.

The habit that fixes this is boring: write down where every enquiry came from and whether it turned into a job, and once a quarter divide what you spent on each source by the jobs it produced.

Free roofing leads, and what free actually costs

"Free roofing leads" is one of the searches Google groups with this one, and the honest answer is that free sources exist but they are paid for in hours rather than pounds.

Source	What it costs in money	What it costs in time	When it starts producing
Google Business Profile	Nothing to set up	An hour to set up properly; twenty minutes a week for posts, photos and replying to reviews	Weeks to months, depending on how many roofers already hold the map spots in your town
Reviews	Nothing	Two minutes at every hand-over to ask, plus a reply to each one	Immediately, on every job where you ask
Referrals from other trades	Nothing, or a drink	Staying in touch with the builders, scaffolders, gutter and fascia firms and letting agents who see roofs before you do	Slowly, then steadily
Your own website	A build cost, then hosting and care each year	Photos of your own jobs and an hour or two checking pages before they go live	Months for planned work; sooner for people who already have your name

The Google Business Profile is the one to do this week if it is not done already. When a homeowner searches "roofer near me" from the driveway after a windy night, Google shows three local businesses with phone numbers above everything else. Being one of those three costs nothing per call. What it needs is the right category, a service list that names the jobs you do, a service area that matches the towns you actually cover, a steady run of reviews and photos of finished roofs added as you go. Most roofers set the profile up once and never touch it again, which is why the ones who do the twenty minutes a week tend to hold the map spots.

Reviews are the other free source, and roofing has a particular reason to collect them. Google puts the question "how can you tell a dodgy roofer?" next to searches about roofers, and the NFRC publishes a guide on choosing a contractor. The homeowner has been warned before they find you. A run of reviews that describe the job done, "new GRP flat roof", "chimney repointed", "re-roof after storm damage", answers the warning before they ring.

Shared versus exclusive leads

Two of the searches Google groups with "roofing leads" are "exclusive roofing leads" and "cheap roofing leads", and they pull in opposite directions.

A shared lead is sold to more than one roofer. leads.work says usually no more than three; Rated People caps it at three buyers per lead. The homeowner gets three calls, three quotes and picks one, so on average two roofers have paid for nothing, and the job is often won on price because that is how the homeowner is comparing three strangers.

An exclusive lead goes to you alone. Get Work sells its subscriptions that way, one roofer per location; Leads Everyday says its leads are never shared. Exclusivity costs more per lead, and it is worth more on planned work where the quote is large and the homeowner is choosing a firm rather than a price. On a small repair, the extra cost per lead can be a big share of the job.

Whichever you buy, three questions settle whether the price is fair:

1. How many other roofers receive this lead, and can I see it before I pay for it?
2. What happens when the number is dead, the job is outside my area, or the homeowner has already booked someone? MyJobQuote's page carries a tradesperson saying they refund on dead leads; check the actual terms of any vendor before relying on that.
3. Is there a minimum spend, a contract or a notice period? Lead Pronto and Get Work both say there is no contract; read the terms of any vendor that does not say so plainly.

Storm season: when the leads arrive on their own

Roofing demand does not arrive evenly. The Met Office runs its storm-naming list from early September to late August the following year, and the 2025–26 list had reached its seventh name, Storm Dave, by early April 2026 (checked 28 August 2026). Every one of those nights sends a wave of "emergency roof repair" and "roofer near me" searches from people standing under a leak.

Bought leads spike at the same time, and so does their price, because every vendor is bidding for the same searches. The roofers who do well out of a storm are the ones who were already visible before it: a profile that shows up in the map pack, an emergency-repair page that was indexed in the summer, a phone that gets answered. A page published the morning after a named storm will not be ranking by the afternoon; the work has to be done in the quiet months. That ongoing work of holding the map spots and ranking a page for each job type in each town is what SEO for roofers is, and it is a separate, monthly cost from building the site itself.

The quiet months matter for the other reason too. After high winds every roofer in town is busy. It is the planned jobs, the re-roofs, the fascias and soffits, the flat roof that was always going to need replacing, that fill the diary in May and June, and those come from pages and reviews, not from storm damage.

Directories: what they are, and what they are not

Checkatrade, MyBuilder, TrustATrader, Rated People and Bark are lead sources too, with a different shape. Instead of buying an enquiry you pay for a listing and a badge, and the homeowner who is already on the directory finds you there next to every other roofer in the area.

The models differ. Checkatrade charges a membership; MyBuilder charges when a homeowner shortlists you; TrustATrader caps the number of members per trade per area; Rated People charges one monthly fee for unlimited shared leads; Bark charges for each introduction. Which one suits a roofer depends on your average job value, whether you need work now or a full diary next year, and whether you already have reviews elsewhere. Our Checkatrade alternatives guide compares them trade by trade with dated prices, and is Checkatrade worth it? works through the break-even.

The thing to hold onto here is ownership. Leave a directory and you take nothing with you: the reviews stay on their site, the profile is deleted, and the homeowner who searched for you there finds someone else. Reviews on your Google profile and pages on your own site are the same effort, and they are yours.

Referrals, insurance work and the trades around you

The best roofing lead is one where the homeowner already trusts you, and those come from people, not platforms.

Insurance work is the clearest example. After storm damage, a homeowner making a claim needs a written report and a quote quickly, and a loss adjuster wants a contractor who is insured and can document the job. The NFRC requires members to evidence employers' and public liability insurance and inspects them before joining and every three years after, which is exactly what an insurer and a nervous homeowner want to see. A short page on your site explaining how you work with insurance claims, and a quote form that asks whether an insurer is involved, turns those enquiries into jobs instead of phone tag.

Other trades see roofs before you do. Builders on extensions, scaffolders, gutter-cleaning firms, fascia and soffit installers, chimney sweeps, letting agents with a stock of older houses: each of them is asked "do you know a good roofer?" more often than you would think. A card, a reciprocal arrangement, and the habit of passing work the other way keeps you on that list.

Past customers are the last group. A roof lasts decades, but the same customer has family, neighbours and a street that saw your van for a fortnight. A follow-up a month after the job, and a request for a review at hand-over, is where most of that comes from.

Paid ads: buying the clicks yourself

Every lead vendor is, underneath, an advertiser. Lead Pronto says its leads come from Google ads, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram; Get Work builds £300 to £750 of ad spend into each subscription tier. The search term "roofing leads" itself costs advertisers around £39.70 a click (DataForSEO, August 2026), which is what vendors pay Google to find roofers like you, and it is built into the price of every lead they sell.

Running your own ads cuts out that margin and gives you the data, but it is not free money. You need a page that can take the call, a budget you can afford to lose while you learn, and the discipline to switch campaigns off when the cost per booked job goes wrong. The click prices for roof-repair searches vary by town and rise sharply in storm weeks, so start small and measure. For a roofer with no time to manage it, paying a vendor to do it is a reasonable trade; just know that is what you are paying for.

The three-year view: what compounds and what stops

Lay the three routes over three years and the shape is clear, even without putting a figure on the parts that depend on your area.

	Bought leads	Directory listing	Your own profile and website
What you pay	Per lead or per month, for as long as you want leads	Membership or per-shortlist fees, for as long as you are listed	A build cost once, then hosting and care each year; monthly SEO only if you choose it
When it produces	This week	Within weeks of listing, faster with reviews	Months, then continuously
What happens when you stop	Leads stop	Leads stop; reviews and profile stay with the platform	Site, reviews, rankings and enquiries stay yours
What compounds	Nothing	Reviews, but on their site	Reviews, rankings, photos, referrals

The subscription vendor makes the arithmetic vivid. Get Work's lowest tier is £600 a month plus VAT (checked 28 August 2026); over three years that is £21,600 plus VAT (our arithmetic), and on the day you stop, the leads stop. That is not an argument against using it, and it may be the right call for a roofer who needs a full diary now. It is an argument for building something alongside it that you get to keep.

What a built-for-you site costs in the UK market, and what moves the price, is in our cost guide; the point here is only that it is a one-off, not a per-lead fee.

A plan for the next twelve months

If you are starting from a van, a phone number and a Facebook page, this is the order that gets the most jobs for the least money.

1. This week: the Google Business Profile. Claim it, set the category to roofing contractor, list every job type you do, set the service area to the towns you cover, add twenty photos of finished roofs. Costs nothing.
2. From the next job onwards: ask for a review at hand-over, while the customer is looking at the finished roof, and ask them to say what was done. Reply to every one.
3. Month one: decide about bought leads. If the diary needs filling, pick one vendor, ask the three questions above, and track cost per booked job from day one. If the diary is full, skip this.
4. Months one to three: get a website that takes the call. Tap-to-call at the top of every page, a page for each job type and each town you genuinely work in, your NFRC, CompetentRoofer, TrustMark or CORC badge linked to the register, your insurance stated, real photos, and a quote form that takes the address, the roof type, how soon they need you, whether a claim is involved, and their photos.
5. Summer: build the storm pages before the storms. Emergency repair, storm damage, how you work with insurers. Get them indexed while nobody is searching for them.
6. Every quarter: run the numbers. Enquiries by source, jobs by source, cost per booked job. Cut whatever is dearest per job. As your own enquiries grow, the bought leads are usually the first to go.

None of this is quick, and none of it is a secret. The vendors on page one of Google are selling a shortcut, and sometimes a shortcut is worth paying for. The roofers who stop needing one are the ones who spent the quiet months building the thing the shortcut was standing in for.