What Thumbtack Leads Actually Cost in 2026 (5,985 Leads Analyzed)

Ask ten Thumbtack pros what a lead costs and you'll get ten different answers — because Thumbtack doesn't give you one. The help center explains that prices move with job type, job size, pro supply, and market, and stops there. Everyone else is triangulating from a screenshot on Reddit or a gut feeling from their own invoice history. We pulled the real number: 5,985 priced Thumbtack leads across 158 categories, tracked inside Tack Tools Pro from March 12 to September 18, 2026.

Quick answer: Across 5,985 priced Thumbtack leads (Tack Tools Pro data, March 12 – September 18, 2026), the median lead price is $27.17 and the mean is $38.98. By category, medians range from $7.62 (Phone or Tablet Repair) up to $300.00 (Roof Installation or Replacement). High-volume categories — TV Mounting, Appliance Repair, Junk Removal, Furniture Assembly — sit well under $30. Big-ticket trades — roofing, concrete, exterior painting, A/C repair, water heater installs — sit well above it, up toward $300.00. Full table below.

What Thumbtack Leads Actually Cost, By Category

The table below covers every category in our dataset with at least 20 priced leads — 20 of the 55 categories that clear that bar, sorted from the highest median price to the lowest. Sample sizes vary widely, from 25 leads on the small end to over a thousand on Appliance Repair, so treat n as a confidence signal: a $300.00 median on 25 leads is a real number, but it moves more with the next few leads than a $25.46 median built on 1,110 of them.

A quick note on method, since this is aggregate data from real customer accounts: every figure below is a median, not an average — medians resist getting dragged around by one outlier lead — computed only for categories with 20 or more priced leads, and built from anonymized totals only. No individual business, lead, or customer is identifiable in any number here.

Category	Leads in sample (n)	Median price
Roof Installation or Replacement	25	$300.00
Concrete Installation	62	$167.02
Exterior Painting	33	$135.85
Central Air Conditioning Repair or Maintenance	80	$95.88
Water Heater Installation or Replacement	51	$86.29
Interior Painting	47	$75.43
Roof Repair or Maintenance	50	$71.73
Plumbing Drain Repair	130	$48.23
Plumbing Pipe Repair	173	$44.74
Electrical and Wiring Repair	207	$43.71
Carpet Cleaning	45	$40.00
Local Moving (under 50 miles)	105	$38.98
Emergency Plumbing	48	$37.83
Handyman	353	$27.57
House Cleaning	118	$27.56
TV Mounting	415	$27.17
Appliance Repair or Maintenance	1,110	$25.46
Junk Removal	396	$22.26
Furniture Assembly	363	$16.85
Phone or Tablet Repair	101	$7.62

Look at the two ends of that table and the pattern is obvious, even without putting a number on the jobs themselves. The top is dominated by trades where a single booked job represents a major renovation: a roof replacement, a concrete pour, a full exterior repaint, a new water heater. The bottom is dominated by trades where the job is small and fast: mounting a TV, assembling a dresser, hauling away a load of junk. Lead price tracks the size of what's at stake in the job, not the category's prestige or technical difficulty. Electrical and Wiring Repair, a licensed trade with real safety stakes, still lands in the middle of the table at $43.71 — well below roofing, concrete, or painting.

It's also worth noticing how sample size clusters at each end. The five most expensive categories in the table — Roof Installation, Concrete Installation, Exterior Painting, Central Air Conditioning Repair, Water Heater Installation — have sample sizes from 25 to 80 leads each. The five cheapest — Handyman, House Cleaning, TV Mounting, Appliance Repair or Maintenance, Furniture Assembly — run from 118 leads up to 1,110. High-ticket trades produce fewer, pricier leads; commodity trades produce a much higher volume of cheap ones. That's consistent with what you'd expect from a marketplace where pros price their own leads against their own job economics, category by category.

Why the Price Spread Is So Wide

Thumbtack doesn't set a fixed rate card, and it says so directly. Per Thumbtack's own help center: "Prices will vary since a job's value can change based on things like the type and size of the job, how many pros are available, and your market." That's the official explanation for the entire spread in the table above — a $300.00 roof-installation lead and a $7.62 phone-repair lead are both "correctly priced" under a model that has no single price.

The mechanism behind that variance is that pros set their own number. Per the same help article, "You choose how competitive you want to be by setting your lead prices. This is the exact amount you'll pay for each lead." A roofer bidding on a full roof replacement is weighing a $300.00 median lead cost against a job worth many times that. A TV-mounting pro has no comparable room — pay anywhere near that much and the lead price alone would swallow the entire job. The category medians in our table are the aggregate result of thousands of individual pros making that same math independently, across 158 categories, one lead price at a time.

One more mechanic worth knowing: not every lead type charges the same way. For Opportunities-style leads, Thumbtack states, "you reach out to the customer first if you're interested in their job. You only pay the price shown if the customer responds to you." That "pay only if they respond" structure is a separate lever from the price itself, and it means the number you see quoted isn't necessarily the number you'll always pay — response behavior factors in before the charge does.

Median vs. Mean: Why the "Average" Number Is Misleading

Two numbers describe the whole dataset: a median of $27.17 and a mean of $38.98. That the mean sits noticeably above the median isn't noise — it's the signature of a right-skewed distribution: most leads are cheap, and a smaller number of expensive leads (roof installs, concrete, exterior painting) pull the average well above where most leads actually sit.

That matters for how a pro should budget. If you run TV Mounting or Appliance Repair and you plan your weekly Thumbtack spend around the platform-wide average of $38.98, you're overestimating what you'll actually pay per lead — your category's own median is closer to $27. If you run Roof Installation and you use that same $38.98 average, you're badly underestimating your real cost — your category's own median, $300.00, is nowhere near that figure. The platform-wide mean is a useful headline number, but it describes no single pro's actual bill. Your category's median is the number to budget from.

How This Compares to Google Search Ads

Thumbtack isn't the only way to buy a lead, so it's worth a cross-check against paid search. LocaliQ's 2025 Home Services Search Advertising Benchmarks — a report built from 3,211 US home-service search ad campaigns — puts the average cost per lead for home services at $90.92.

Held against that number, most of Thumbtack looks cheap. TV Mounting ($27.17), Appliance Repair or Maintenance ($25.46), Junk Removal ($22.26), and Furniture Assembly ($16.85) all come in at a fraction of the search-ads average — that's the volume end of the table, and it's not close. But the comparison flips at the top of our table: Roof Installation or Replacement ($300.00), Concrete Installation ($167.02), and Exterior Painting ($135.85) all cost more than the LocaliQ cross-trade average, and Central Air Conditioning Repair or Maintenance ($95.88) sits right above it too. The honest read is that Thumbtack is not universally "the cheap option" — it's cheap for volume, low-ticket categories, and it's genuinely expensive for the trades where a single job is worth a lot of money.

What a Higher Lead Price Means For Your Business

The dollar amount at risk on a bad lead scales with the table above, and that changes how much attention a lead deserves after you pay for it. A Furniture Assembly lead that goes nowhere costs you $16.85. A Roof Installation lead that goes nowhere costs you $300.00 — a very different amount of money sitting on the line for the exact same outcome: a customer who never replies to anyone.

Thumbtack builds a safety net for exactly that scenario. Per its refund policy for Thumbtack numbers, the platform states it will "automatically refund you if a customer doesn't reply to any pro they contacted within 72 hours." We've written the full mechanics of that rule — including the response-time and contact-info conditions attached to it — in our 72-hour and 4-hour refund rules breakdown. The short version: the refund is automatic, but only if you hold up your end within the window Thumbtack specifies.

That 72-hour clock matters more in dollar terms the higher up this table your category sits. A pro paying $300.00 median per lead in Roof Installation who lets a handful of non-responsive customers slip past the refund window is leaving real money on the table every month — the kind of gap Fair Credit inside Tack Tools Pro exists to catch, by drafting the refund request the moment a lead looks eligible instead of waiting for a pro to notice on their own. We go deeper on the full economics of unrecovered lead spend, across categories, in how much bad Thumbtack leads are actually costing you. For any pro working the water heater, A/C, painting, concrete, or roofing categories at the top of this table, treating the refund window as part of the cost of the lead — not an afterthought — is one of the highest-leverage habits available on a lead that stalls.

None of this changes what a lead is worth if you win the job. A $300.00 Roof Installation lead and a $16.85 Furniture Assembly lead are both a bet that you'll be the pro the customer picks. Thumbtack sends the same request to several pros, so how quickly you reply is one of the few variables in that bet you actually control — and it's the one that also decides whether a stalled lead still qualifies for a refund. The category table above tells you what you're paying going in; what you do in the first few hours decides whether that spend turns into a booked job or money back in your balance.

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Sources

• Thumbtack — Pay for leads
• LocaliQ — 2025 Home Services Search Advertising Benchmarks
• Thumbtack Help — Refund policy for Thumbtack numbers
• Tack Tools Pro internal data — 5,985 leads, 2026-03-12 → 2026-09-18
• Full citation list: tacktoolspro.com/sources

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