Electrical leads: buy them, or build a source you own

An electrical lead is usually a name, a phone number, and a short description of the job, handed to you by a marketplace or a lead-generation company for a price. Some are shared, meaning the same homeowner's request is resold to several electricians at once. Some are exclusive, meaning you are the only one who gets it, at a higher price per lead.

The same word covers a small outlet repair and a full panel upgrade, even though the jobs behind them are worth very different amounts to your shop. A lead that turns into a small service call and a lead that turns into a full panel upgrade can cost the electrician the same amount to acquire, which changes which type of lead is actually worth buying.

Whichever kind you buy, the seller's job ends the moment the lead is delivered. Whether the homeowner ever answers your callback, whether the quote gets followed up, and whether the invoice gets paid are entirely on you, and the fee is owed either way.

A shared electrical lead goes out to several electricians at once, commonly 3 to 8 contractors on a single inquiry (LeadTruffle's 2026 guide, backed by the FTC's 2023 HomeAdvisor consent order over exactly this practice, a $7.2 million settlement). The homeowner ends up fielding several calls within minutes of submitting one form, and whoever reaches them first usually wins the job regardless of price.

An exclusive lead is sold to one electrician only, at a higher price, and closes at a meaningfully better rate. Hook Agency's 2026 lead-services analysis puts close rates at 27 to 30 percent on exclusive leads against 13 to 20 percent on shared ones. For a homeowner deciding between five electricians who all called within the hour, being the only one calling is worth paying for.

Either format is rented access to a lead seller's advertising. The moment the payments stop, so do the leads, regardless of how many jobs you have closed from that seller in the past.

The number to track is cost per booked job, which is the lead price divided by your close rate, not the sticker price of the lead itself. At 13 to 20 percent close on shared leads, an electrician needs five to eight paid-for inquiries to land one job, and every lead that does not book still cost money.

As a hypothetical example only, on a $200 outlet or switch repair, even a modest lead price eats a large share of that ticket once the misses are counted. On a $6,500 panel upgrade, the same lead cost shrinks to a small fraction of the job, which is part of why electricians running mostly bigger-ticket work tolerate lead buying better than electricians running mostly small service calls.

Under a 17 percent revenue share, that $200 repair costs $34 and the $6,500 panel upgrade costs $1,105, with nothing owed on inquiries that never became a paid job. Whether that beats buying leads outright depends on your close rate and your mix of small versus large tickets, which is why running your own numbers matters more than any sales pitch.

Invoca's analysis of 60 million calls found that 27 percent of inbound home services calls go unanswered. An electrical lead you paid for that reaches voicemail is money spent for nothing, and a homeowner with no power or a tripped breaker that will not reset will typically move to the next name rather than wait. A missed emergency HVAC call runs $500 to $900 in lost revenue by Angi and ServiceTitan's figures; a missed electrical emergency call sits under the same kind of pressure.

That gap exists whether the lead was bought from a marketplace or generated from your own site. It is a staffing problem, not a lead-quality problem, which is why PayOnJobs pairs every lead source it builds with a 24/7 AI receptionist. Since our fee is only owed once the job is paid, picking up the after-hours call is in our interest as much as it is in yours.

There is no setup fee, no monthly fee, and no fee per lead. We build a website in your name, manage your Google Business Profile, run your Google Ads account, answer every call around the clock including the after-hours no-power calls, follow up on open estimates, and send the payment link. We take 17 percent of revenue on jobs that came through the tracked number and that the customer paid for, split automatically at the moment of payment.

You fund your own Google ad spend directly, no markup, at a $1,500 a month minimum, because that cost is not contingent on results. We sign one electrical partner per 25-mile radius, the initial term is 12 months, then either side can leave with 30 days notice. The domain, the website, the customer list, the Google Business Profile, and the reviews are yours to keep.

If your business runs mostly larger jobs, panel upgrades, generator installs, whole-house rewires, and your office already closes exclusive leads at 30 percent or better, buying exclusive leads outright can sometimes land close to or under 17 percent per job on the biggest tickets. It may also fit better if you need call volume this week and cannot wait the roughly 24 days it takes to stand up an owned source.

PayOnJobs is not a fit if you cannot fund the $1,500 a month minimum ad spend, if you prefer to keep answering every call yourself rather than through an AI receptionist, or if another electrician already holds your 25-mile area. We are a new company and do not yet publish partner results; the contract terms are all in writing so you can judge us on those instead.