The median home services contractor spends about $9,500 a month on Google Ads. The top 5% spend more than $96,000. Here’s where you fit, and what that money actually buys.
There is no single right Google Ads budget. But there is a market, and we can see it.
Across 978 home services contractors on SearchLight in October 2026, monthly Google Ads spend ranged from a few hundred dollars to six figures. The median contractor spent $9,480. One in four spent more than $25,000.
And spending is rising. Among the same 563 contractors measured a year apart, Google Ads spend per contractor is up 16%, with the biggest spenders up 23%.
The better question isn’t how much you spend. It’s how many bookable leads that spend produces, and what your team does with them.
Far more than everyone else. The spend is concentrated. The top 5% of contractors account for 35% of all Google Ads dollars on the platform. That’s 48 businesses spending nearly four times as much as the entire bottom half of contractors combined, who account for just 9%.
Half of contractors spend less than $9,480 a month. To join the top 5%, you need to spend nearly $97,000.
Yes. Google Ads spend per contractor is up 16% year over year, and it grew at every tier. The biggest spenders grew fastest.
LSA grew nearly as fast, up 15%. The smaller channels grew fastest from small bases: Facebook spend rose 57% and Bing 45%. Google Ads still takes 64% of every paid dollar these contractors spend.
A lead isn’t a job. When SearchLight grades Google Ads calls, about half are bookable: a real customer, in your service area, asking for a service you offer. The rest are wrong numbers, out-of-area callers, existing customers and hang-ups.
That makes the real price of a Google Ads lead about $200, not $100.
At the median budget, a contractor can expect roughly 46 bookable leads a month. The top 5% are buying about 475.
Modeled, not measured. We applied two published SearchLight benchmarks to each spend tier: a $104 blended cost per lead for Google Ads (January 2026) and a 51% bookable rate on graded Google Ads calls (August 2026). That works out to about $204 per bookable lead. Real results vary widely by trade, market and campaign mix. Non-branded search runs closer to $149 per lead, and Performance Max closer to $72.
Once a lead is bookable, the rest is up to your business. Three of your own numbers decide what a Google Ads budget is worth.
Take a hypothetical contractor at the median: 46 bookable leads a month. Say they book 60%, sell 45% of the jobs they book, and average $1,200 a ticket. That’s about 13 sold jobs and $15,100 in revenue on $9,480 of spend.
Now raise the book rate from 60% to 70%, with the same budget. Revenue climbs to about $17,600. A better phone team was worth roughly $2,500 a month, with no extra ad spend.
That’s why the right budget is the one your team can convert. Doubling spend into a 40% book rate buys fewer jobs than it should.
Estimates for planning, built on SearchLight benchmarks. Your actual results depend on your trade, market and campaigns.
Google Ads is the biggest line item, but most contractors run more than one channel. Here’s monthly spend among contractors active in each, October 2026.
| Channel | Contractors | Median | Top 25% | Top 10% | Top 5% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | 978 | $9,480 | $24,960 | $59,870 | $96,810 |
| Google LSA | 914 | $4,600 | $10,900 | $25,310 | $39,550 |
| Bing | 277 | $1,480 | $4,230 | $9,770 | $18,660 |
| 216 | $1,340 | $3,160 | $7,750 | $14,030 |
Facebook is the most concentrated: the top 5% of spenders account for 49% of all Facebook dollars.
Every number on this page came from SearchLight’s own data, pulled through ClaraT, the AI that runs on SearchLight. That matters for one reason: benchmarks are only as trustworthy as the way the data is handled.
Benchmarks tell you where the market is. SearchLight Nexus shows where you are: your spend, your bookable leads by campaign, and your book and close rates, and lets you ask ClaraT about any of it in plain English.
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