How do roofers get leads?
Almost every roofing lead comes from one of five places: referrals and neighbors who saw your sign, door knocking and canvassing after a storm, lead sites like Angi and Thumbtack, paid ads on Google or Facebook, and people who find you on Google on their own, through the map or your website. The first two depend on you being out there. The middle two you pay for every time. The last one is the only source that keeps growing after you stop working on it.
That is the frame for the rest of this guide. Renting leads is not wrong. It is just the most expensive way to keep a crew busy once you add it up over a year.
How much do roofers pay per lead?
It depends on where the lead comes from, and the numbers are higher than most roofers expect.
- Google Ads: LocaliQ's 2025 home services benchmarks put the average cost per lead for roofing and gutters at $228.15, the highest of any home services category they track, with an average cost per click of $10.70.
- Lead sites: Angi, HomeAdvisor and Thumbtack do not publish one price list. Prices change with the job, the town and demand, and estimates from roofers and marketing sites range from about $15 to over $100 for a shared roofing lead, and more for an exclusive one. Treat those as ranges, not quotes.
The number that matters is cost per signed job. A shared lead is sold to several roofers at once. If you pay $50 for a lead and close one in ten, that is $500 in lead costs for each job you sign, before you have bought a single bundle of shingles. Track it for a month and you will know your own figure.
It is also worth knowing who you are buying from. In 2023 the FTC finalized an order against HomeAdvisor, requiring it to pay up to $7.2 million and stop misrepresenting the quality of the leads it sold to contractors. Ask any lead seller how many other roofers get the same lead, and what happens when the number is bad.
What is the best company to buy roofing leads from?
There is no single best one, because the same company performs differently in different towns. The questions that decide it are the same everywhere. Is the lead exclusive or shared, and with how many roofers? Can you get credit for wrong numbers and people outside your area? Is there a contract or a monthly minimum? Can you pause in the slow months? Run any service for a few weeks, track cost per signed job, and drop it if it does not beat what your own channels bring in. If you are deciding whether to use lead sites at all, our answer on whether lead generation sites are worth it lays out the trade-off.
How to get roofing leads without door knocking
Here is the owned side, in the order I would do it.
1. Fix the Google Business Profile. When a homeowner searches "roofer near me" or "roof repair Louisville", Google shows three businesses on a map above everything else. Your profile decides whether you are one of them. Set the primary category to Roofing contractor, list every service you do, add real job photos every week, keep the hours right, and answer every review.
2. Ask every customer for a Google review. Send the link the day the job is finished. Fresh, steady reviews are one of the strongest signals for the map, and a roofer with recent reviews looks alive next to one whose last review is from 2022. Here is how to get more Google reviews without it feeling awkward.
3. Give every service and town its own page. Roof replacement, storm damage repair, metal roofing and gutters are different searches. So are Jeffersontown, St. Matthews and Shelbyville. A page about storm damage repair in a town you actually work in can rank for exactly that search. One "Services" page that lists everything ranks for nothing.
4. Make the website easy to call from. Most storm calls come from a phone. If the number is not tappable at the top of the screen, or the site takes five seconds to load, the homeowner hits back and calls the next roofer. This is what we build into every roofing company website design: fast pages, click-to-call, real photos, and a page for each service.