How much do Facebook ads cost a UK trade business?

"How much do Facebook ads cost?" is a bit like "how much does an extension cost?". The honest answer is "it depends", and anyone who gives you one number without asking questions is guessing.

But "it depends" isn't much help either. So here's how the pricing actually works, what the published benchmarks say, and how I'd think about budget if you run a trades or construction business.

You set the budget, Meta sets the price

The first thing to know: Facebook ads (and Instagram, since they run through the same Meta system) don't have a price list. There's no fixed fee per click or per lead.

You decide how much to spend a day or in total. Meta then runs an auction every time someone scrolls, and your ad competes with every other business trying to reach the same people. What you pay for each view, click or enquiry comes out of that auction.

That means your costs move with:

• Who you're targeting. Homeowners in a tight radius around Cardiff cost differently to the whole of Wales.
• Time of year. Busy retail periods, like the run-up to Christmas, bring more advertisers into the same auction.
• How good the ad is. Meta rewards ads people actually stop and watch. A real video of a finished loft beats a stock photo of a smiling family.
• What you ask Meta to optimise for. Clicks, messages and lead forms all price differently.

So you're never "paying Facebook £X per lead". You're spending a budget, and the cost per lead is the result.

The three numbers you'll hear about

Term	What it means	Why it matters
CPM	Cost per 1,000 times your ad is shown	How expensive your audience is to reach
CPC	Cost per click	How well the ad earns attention
CPL	Cost per lead (enquiry)	What you pay for each form or message

Most trade owners only need to watch the last one, and one more that Meta can't show you. I'll come to that.

What the benchmarks say

The most widely quoted public benchmarks come from LocaliQ, which publishes Facebook ad data by industry each year. In its 2026 Facebook advertising benchmarks, lead campaigns in the Home and Home Improvement category averaged:

• Cost per lead: $42.95
• Cost per click: $2.18
• Click-through rate: 2.14%
• Conversion rate: 5.32%

Across all industries, the same report puts the average cost per lead at $27.39.

Two big caveats before you pin anything on those:

1. They're in US dollars and come from LocaliQ's own advertiser data, not a UK-only study. Treat them as a rough guide to how home improvement compares with other industries, not as your UK price.
2. "Home improvement" lumps a lot together. A gutter clean and a £60,000 loft conversion sit in the same category, and they attract very different people.

I haven't found a trustworthy, public, UK-only cost per lead for trades, and I'd be wary of anyone quoting one without saying where it came from.

Why cost per lead is the wrong number to chase

This is the bit that costs trade businesses the most money.

Cheap leads are easy to get. Make the form short, make the offer vague ("free quote, no obligation!"), target everyone, and the cost per lead drops. So does the quality. You end up ringing people who don't answer, can't afford the job, or were "just looking".

Expensive leads can be the bargain. If a lead costs you three times as much but the person has a budget, owns the house and wants to start in spring, that's the one you want.

The number that matters is cost per job won:

Cost per job won = total ad spend ÷ jobs won from those ads

And then return:

Return = revenue from those jobs ÷ total ad spend

For a trade business selling bigger jobs, a higher cost per lead that turns into more signed contracts is a better deal every time.

What decides your cost per job won

Most of it happens after the click, not inside Meta.

How fast you ring back

A study published in Harvard Business Review found that firms which tried to contact an online enquiry within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited even an hour longer, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited a day or more.

In practice, if you're on the tools all day and ring back at six, a good chunk of your ad spend is wasted before you've said hello. Fix the follow-up before you raise the budget.

What the ad shows

Real jobs, filmed on your phone, with you or your team in them. Before and after. A walk-through of a finished kitchen. People trust what they can see, and they ring the firm they feel they already know.

Who the ad filters out

A good trade ad puts some people off on purpose. Show your price range, your area, the kind of job you do. Fewer, better enquiries beat a pile of tyre-kickers.

What happens between the lead and the quote

Questions answered, a site visit booked quickly, a quote that arrives when you said it would. None of that shows up in the ad dashboard, and all of it shows up in your cost per job won.

So how much should you spend?

There's no magic figure, but here's how I'd think about it.

• Start from the job, not the ad. What's an average job worth to you, and what margin do you make on it? That tells you what you can afford to pay to win one.
• Give it long enough. Meta needs time and data to find the right people. A week isn't a test. A couple of months usually is.
• Budget for testing. Some ads won't work. That's normal, and it's how you find the ones that do.
• Count VAT and management. Ad spend is only part of the cost. If someone runs the ads for you, add their fee, and compare the total to the jobs it brings in.

For comparison with the lead platforms, the fixed cost of Checkatrade and the per-lead fees on MyBuilder and Bark are covered in is Checkatrade worth it and Checkatrade alternatives. The big difference with your own ads is that the lead is yours alone. Nobody else is quoting it.

A real example

Paradigm Lofts, a loft conversion firm in South Wales, spent £3,048 on Facebook and Instagram ads in about 4 to 5 months. That's roughly £600 to £760 a month. It turned into £257,000 in closed work, an 84x return, and Gavin, the owner, is booked up 6 months ahead.

That's one client, one trade, one period. It isn't a promise, and loft conversions are high-value jobs, which helps. But it shows why cost per job won is the number to watch. You can read the Paradigm Lofts case study, or get the Paradigm breakdown for every ad, the targeting, and the numbers behind the £257,000. It's free.

The short answer

• Facebook ads cost whatever you decide to spend. Meta's auction decides what that buys.
• Published benchmarks put home improvement leads at around $43 each, in US data. Your UK number will be different, and it matters less than you think.
• What matters is how many of those leads become signed jobs, and that's down to your ads, your follow-up and your quoting.

If you want to see how we put that together, from the ad to the callback to the booked job, it's all on how it works.

And if you're doing £20K a month or more and want a steady flow of enquiries that are yours alone, you can apply here. I only take on a handful of businesses, so I'll be straight with you about whether it'll work for yours.