UK Mortgage Broker Marketing Costs 2026: The Published Prices, and the Three Nobody Publishes

Last Updated on August 17, 2026

Written for mortgage advisers, not for borrowers. Whito is a marketing publisher. We are not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, and nothing here is financial advice, mortgage advice or a financial promotion. Compliance sign off for anything your firm publishes rests with your firm or your network.

Almost every article about mortgage marketing costs is built on numbers nobody can stand behind. We went looking for the real ones, and the interesting finding was how few of them exist.

Here is what we mean. The only published benchmark we could find covering the paid search costs of named UK mortgage brokers put the average cost per click at £86 in its 2025 edition, with one firm at £868 and two firms at £0. The 2026 edition of the same report, from the same publisher, put the average at £7. Both cannot be right, and the series gives you no way to tell which is wrong. So we are not quoting either figure, and neither should anyone else.

That is the state of cost data in this sector. Which leads to the mistake.

Most brokers budget for marketing as though it were a plumbing business with extra paperwork. Website, ads, a directory, done. But in a regulated intermediary the largest cost of acquiring a client is usually not in the marketing budget at all. It sits in the network fee, the compliance overhead and the regulatory levies, and almost none of those numbers are published anywhere. You cannot work out your real cost per client from a marketing spreadsheet, because most of the cost is in a different spreadsheet, and part of it is in a contract nobody puts on a website.

So this guide is split. First, prices you can actually check. Then the three costs that shape your economics more than any of them, and that nobody publishes.

Published prices: buying enquiries

This is the one area of mortgage marketing where real rate cards exist, which makes it the only place you can budget with any confidence.

VouchedFor

Subscription pricing, from its published price list, page last updated 3 July 2026. All figures exclude VAT.

Per enquiry pricing, from its published charges page last updated 6 August 2026, with these rates stated as effective from 1 September 2026. Excludes VAT, charged per enquiry received.

For context on the same page, a financial advice enquiry runs from £71 at any level to £319 at the £500,000 plus band. Mortgage enquiries are cheap by comparison, which tells you something about what the two are worth downstream.

Unbiased

Unbiased publishes an entry price and not much else. Mortgage adviser enquiries “begin at £10 plus VAT”, against £30 plus VAT for financial adviser enquiries and £33 plus VAT for accountants. Its three subscription tiers, Self-employed at up to ten leads a month, Regional at up to fifty, and Nationwide uncapped, all say “request pricing”. No subscription price is published.

One detail worth knowing before you sign anything. Unbiased’s own pages disagree on the cost of an additional profile location for mortgage advisers. Its pricing page says £61 plus VAT. Its mortgage lead generation page says £66 plus VAT. We are quoting both rather than picking one.

Unbiased also publishes client results on its lead generation page, including a 4x first year return and a 460% return. Those are unaudited customer testimonials with no stated basis or period. Treat them as marketing, not evidence.

Mortgage specific lead sellers

Two publish prices openly on their own sites.

Several others in this market publish no prices at all. The spread on published prices, roughly £10 to £139 depending on who you buy from and how qualified the enquiry is, is the honest answer to “what does a mortgage lead cost”. Anything narrower than that is someone selling you something.

Published prices: the rest of the stack

Reviews

Trustpilot’s own plans page served us prices in US dollars and its UK pricing page would not load, so we are not printing a pound figure for it. A converted number is not a published price.

The practical point for a small firm: your two highest value review surfaces, Google and VouchedFor, cost either nothing or something you are likely already paying for. Paid review software is a Build stage decision, not a Start stage one.

Systems

ClientTree publishes its pricing, which almost nobody in broker software does: £45 plus VAT per user per month, monthly rolling with a one month minimum, no setup fee. Identity verification checks are £1.50 plus VAT each and anti money laundering checks 25p plus VAT each. Integrations with third party sourcing systems are subject to those providers’ own licence fees.

Acre, Smartr365, Twenty7tec, Mortgage Brain, Finova and Iress publish no pricing that we could find. If you are comparing systems, you are making calls, not reading pages.

Website and agency support

From our own UK research, which we keep updated rather than guessing at.

Regulatory costs, from the regulator

These are the numbers with the least ambiguity attached, because the FCA publishes them.

Read practically, a directly authorised firm with annual income at or below £100,000 pays the £2,200 minimum for 2026/27, plus levies. Above that, add £12.25 per £1,000, though that rate is still a proposal in a consultation paper and will be confirmed in the policy statement. We are not publishing a “typical bill”, because the FCA does not publish a worked example and we are not going to invent one.

On the compensation side, the FSCS levy for the mortgage intermediation class was raised to £4m in May 2026, with compensation costs for mortgage intermediaries forecast at £400,000, up from a £100,000 forecast the previous November. The class levy covers more than compensation, including a share of FSCS management expenses, so it is not a per firm figure and cannot be divided down.

The three costs nobody publishes

This is the part that matters, and it is the reason cost guides in this sector are usually fiction.

1. What a network charges an appointed representative

No UK mortgage network publishes its procuration fee split or its monthly appointed representative fee. We checked. One network’s own guidance to brokers tells them to ask about compliance fees, FCA fees and professional indemnity insurance, discloses no figures, and gives a phone number.

This is the single largest line in most brokers’ cost of doing business, and it is deliberately not public. Third party sources put the adviser’s retained share somewhere between 70% and 94% of commission, and monthly fees somewhere between £300 and £1,000, but every one of those figures is secondary, several come from companies that sell services to brokers, and networks negotiate individually anyway. We are not putting a number on it. What we will say is this: if you are directly authorised, your FCA cost is published and you can plan it. If you are an appointed representative, your largest cost is a negotiation, and you should treat the first offer as an opening position.

2. Professional indemnity insurance

We could not find a single UK insurer or broker publishing a professional indemnity premium range specifically for FCA regulated mortgage intermediaries.

What is published is not usable. One comparison site shows a £47 average annual premium for an independent financial adviser at £2m of cover, based on the average of the three cheapest quotes it could find, with no date attached. Broker facing blogs assert £1,000 to £5,000 a year. Those figures differ by a factor of about fifty, so at least one of them is not describing a regulated mortgage intermediary. We are not printing a number for this. Get quotes.

3. A credible UK cost per click or cost per lead for mortgage keywords

There is no neutral, methodologically transparent, UK specific published cost per click or cost per lead for mortgage broker keywords. The one dataset covering named UK brokers is the series with the £86 and £7 problem described at the top of this article. The rest of the UK figures we found, £3 to £12 a click, £20 to £50 a lead, come from agencies selling mortgage lead generation, with no dataset behind them.

The widely quoted benchmarks that look authoritative are US. WordStream’s finance and insurance figures, a $3.39 cost per click and a $74.44 cost per lead, are published as medians from US campaigns only, in dollars. Converting them into pounds and calling it a UK benchmark is how a made up number gets into a hundred blog posts.

If you want to know what a click costs you in your postcode for your keywords, the only reliable source is your own account after a month of spending. Budget for that month as research, not as acquisition.

An illustrative build up, clearly labelled

No source publishes a typical total marketing cost for a UK mortgage broker, so what follows is our construction from the published components above. It is an illustration, not a market figure, and your network fee, which we cannot know, may be larger than all of it.

A two adviser firm, first twelve months, using published prices only.

Three of the eleven lines are unknown, and two of those three are probably among the largest. That is the honest picture, and it is more useful than a confident total that happens to be wrong.

What to spend on, in order

Start. Own your claims and your reviews before you buy anything. A consistent website with your firm reference number, your permissions, named advisers, and a review request built into every case. Cost: your time, plus a website. Skip the paid review platform for now.

Build. Add one directory and one content stream, and measure them separately. A VouchedFor subscription at £720 a year plus VAT with enquiries at £49 and up is a measurable channel, because the price per enquiry is on a page and you can compare it with what a case is worth to you. Do the arithmetic before you switch it on: at £95 an enquiry, and being honest about how many enquiries become completions, work out your real cost per completed case.

Scale. Only now consider paid search, and only with the first month treated as data collection. Then paid review software, then video. In that order, because every one of them gets cheaper per lead once the first two stages are working, and none of them fixes a firm whose numbers contradict each other.

Common questions

What does a mortgage lead cost in the UK?

Published prices run from around £10 plus VAT for an entry level directory enquiry to £139 plus VAT for a high wealth band enquiry, with mortgage specific lead sellers publishing £10 to £65 per exclusive lead. There is no single average, and anyone quoting one narrowly is usually selling leads.

How much does the FCA cost a small mortgage firm?

For 2026/27, the FCA’s published general minimum fee is £2,200. Confirm it against the FCA’s final rates before you budget from it. A firm applying for direct authorisation pays a Category 4 application fee of £2,820, which the FCA states covers most mortgage broker applications. Firms with income above £100,000 pay a variable amount on top, proposed at £12.25 per £1,000 of income above that threshold. Levies are additional.

Is it cheaper to be directly authorised or an appointed representative?

We cannot answer that with published data, and neither can anyone else, because no network publishes its fees. What is knowable is that the directly authorised route has published costs you can plan around, and the appointed representative route has negotiated costs that you have to ask for.

What should a two adviser firm spend on marketing?

Less than most guides suggest, and in a strict order. Get your published claims consistent and your review process running first, because both are close to free and both change what search engines and AI assistants can say about you. Only then buy enquiries, and only where the price per enquiry is published so you can measure it.

Why won’t you publish a cost per click for mortgage keywords?

Because no source we could find publishes one credibly for the UK. The only UK broker dataset contradicts itself by an order of magnitude between editions, and the authoritative looking benchmarks are US campaigns in dollars. We would rather leave a gap than fill it with a number that cannot be defended.

Method, limits and legal position

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