Solar and heat pump leads: what UK platforms charge in 2026

Last Updated on September 17, 2026

Buying enquiries is the fastest way for a solar or heat pump installer to fill a diary, and the hardest spend to judge, because most of the companies selling them will not tell you the price until you are on the phone. Whito checked the nine UK lead suppliers and trade platforms it could find publishing a page about buying solar or heat pump enquiries, on 3 September 2026. Four published a price per lead. Five did not, and one of those five has a pricing page with no figure in pounds anywhere on it.

Who publishes a price, and who does not

Every figure above was read on the supplier’s own page on 3 September 2026. Nothing is taken from a comparison article, because comparison articles about lead prices are almost always written by companies selling leads.

What the renewables specialists charge

Solar PV Leads publishes £8 to £15 a lead, which is the cheapest published price in the set. The structure matters as much as the number. The per lead cost is paid directly to the lead provider, and a weekly retainer for campaign management is charged separately, so £8 is not the whole cost of an £8 lead. The page says enquiries are exclusive where agreed, and states plainly that no lead generation service can honestly guarantee sales.

Lead Pronto publishes from £25 a standard lead, from £35 branded and from £130 for a booked appointment, on pay as you go with no retainer and no long term contract. It also claims 32 per cent of phone verified leads booked into appointments and an 18 per cent cost of sale on national solar campaigns. That is the vendor’s own marketing claim about its own performance, not an independent measurement, and should be treated as such.

HelloLeads publishes £35 to £75 for a ground source heat pump lead, with a minimum order of ten and the first three free for quality assessment. It sells only to MCS certified installers working to MIS 3005, which is the tightest qualification requirement in the set. It is also the highest published price.

GMS Leads sells exclusive air source heat pump leads, never resold, with a nine day replacement guarantee for unqualified leads. It publishes no price.

What the general platforms charge

Checkatrade now publishes three tiers: a free profile at £0, Approved at £30 a month, and Growth from £59 a month. The Growth tier works by choosing your postcodes and the number of leads you want a year, then paying a fixed monthly cost. That prices a volume of enquiries. There is no per lead figure anywhere on the page, and no statement about whether VAT is included.

MyBuilder charges a variable lead fee set by what the customer describes, and says it can start from £7. The fee is shown before you respond and is not adjusted afterwards.

Rated People advertises one fee for unlimited leads and publishes no figure for that fee.

Bark sells credit packs and says you will know the cost in credits before you respond. Its pricing page carries no price in pounds at all, so a professional cannot work out what a credit costs without signing up.

Renewables Excellence sits outside the group. It is a directory, and it publishes a free listing and a Featured Installer place at £49 a month or £489 a year, and states it charges no lead fee, funding itself through manufacturers, tariff affiliates and featured placements instead.

The number that matters is cost per won install

A lead price on its own tells you nothing. What you are buying is a share of a job, and the arithmetic that matters is the published price divided by the share of leads that turn into work.

Take the published prices above with a conversion rate you set yourself, because nobody else’s is yours. A £15 lead won one time in ten costs £150 a job. A £25 lead won one in five costs £125. A £75 ground source lead won one in eight costs £600.

Set those against the revenue. A typical 4.5 kilowatt peak solar system costs a household around £7,600, so £150 of lead spend is about 2 per cent of the job and £600 is about 8 per cent. Neither is obviously wrong. Both are decisions you can only make with a real conversion number from your own diary, which means recording the outcome of every bought lead for three months before you scale anything.

The expensive mistake is buying a second batch before the first batch has told you anything.

What you cannot work out from published prices

For five of the nine suppliers checked, there is no published per lead price, so there is no way to calculate cost per won install before you commit. Checkatrade puts a price on a year of enquiries at a fixed monthly cost. Rated People and Bark publish no figure at all for the thing they sell. GMS Leads publishes none either.

That is not automatically a reason to avoid them. Treat the first month with any of them as an experiment with a number attached, and insist on a per lead or per job figure in writing before the second.

Before you buy anything

Ask whether the lead is exclusive or shared, and if shared, with how many firms. Ask what the replacement policy is for an unqualified lead and how long you have to claim it. Ask whether the price you were quoted is the whole cost or whether a management retainer sits on top. Ask for the figure in writing per lead, not per month, so you can do the division yourself.

And check the alternative before you spend. A free listing, a complete Google Business Profile and your MCS number published in text on your own site cost nothing and keep working while you are on a job.

Prices in this study are published figures read on each supplier’s own website on 3 September 2026: Solar PV Leads, Lead Pronto, HelloLeads, GMS Leads, Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Rated People, Bark and Renewables Excellence. No figure here is taken from a third party comparison. Lead pricing changes often and varies by area, volume and plan, so confirm current rates with each supplier. Conversion rates used in the worked examples are illustrative, not measured.

Whito is independent and companies cannot pay to appear.

Related reading

• What a UK trade lead is actually worth
• Marketing for renewable energy installers
• How much do solar panels cost in the UK in 2026?

Ethan Whitmore Co-founder and Analyst

Ethan Whitmore is a co-founder of Whito. He has spent over nine years in SEO and ecommerce inside global SaaS platforms, enterprise brands and payments companies. His work covers technical SEO, content strategy, conversion and video production.

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