How much does a garage lead cost? UK prices compared

Every garage marketing channel has a cost per lead. Some publish it, some bury it in a monthly fee, and some never quite tell you at all. The trouble is that the headline number is the least useful figure in the whole deal, because a £5 lead you never convert is more expensive than a £20 lead that fills a ramp.

This guide sets out what the main UK channels actually charge, checked against their own published pricing in August 2026, and then shows you how to work out the only number that matters for your own workshop.

What the main channels charge right now

These are the prices each company publishes on its own website, checked on 14 August 2026. Where a figure is not published, that is noted rather than guessed at.

Prices are as published by each company and VAT treatment differs between them, so compare the total you would actually be invoiced. Packages change, so check the current figure before you sign anything.

Three ways of paying, and who carries the risk

The pricing model matters more than the amount, because it decides who loses money in a quiet month.

Pay per click

Google is explicit that cost-per-click bidding charges you for the click itself. As its own documentation puts it, your actual cost-per-click is the final amount you are charged for a click, and what happens after that click is not part of the calculation. Somebody comparing prices from three counties away costs you exactly the same as a driver who rings up and books. For a garage selling labour hours rather than marking up stock, that is an uncomfortable way to spend, and it is why the true cost per enquiry from ads is usually several times the cost per click.

Pay a monthly subscription

A flat monthly fee is easy to budget and gets cheaper per job the busier you are. BookMyGarage publishes £149 plus VAT a month for its Accelerate package, and to be fair to them they send attended bookings rather than raw enquiries, which is a genuinely different and more valuable product than a name and a number. They state that Accelerate garages see a 243 per cent uplift in bookings against non-Accelerate garages, and quote an average customer invoice of £297.

Run their own figures through and the model becomes clear. £149 plus VAT is £178.80 a month. At the thirteen bookings a month they cite as an Accelerate average, that is around £13.75 a booking, which is competitive for a confirmed appointment. The catch is what happens when the month is slow. At three bookings the same fee works out at £59.60 each, and at zero bookings you have still paid £178.80. The subscription model puts the volume risk on you.

Pay per lead or per booking

Here the platform only earns when you get something. FixMyCar charges £99 plus VAT as a one-off admin fee and then takes success fees on bookings you win, and it is a big audience with real reach, including partnerships with the RAC and Green Flag. The difficulty for planning is that the success-fee rate is not published on its packages page, so you cannot model your cost per won job in advance. You have to join first and find out after.

A fixed, published fee per accepted lead is the version of this model you can actually do arithmetic with before you commit. That is the approach we take, and the numbers are on the page rather than behind an enquiry form.

The number that matters is cost per won job

Cost per lead is a vanity figure. Cost per won job is what hits your accounts. The arithmetic is simple: take what you spend, divide it by the jobs you actually booked from it.

Read across that table and you can see why a cheap lead with a poor conversion rate loses to a dearer one you reliably win. It also shows where the real leverage sits. Halving your price per lead helps once. Moving from one in five to one in three helps on every lead you ever buy again, and that is a matter of answering the phone faster and quoting more clearly, which costs nothing. Our guide to getting more customers for your garage covers the tactics that shift that rate.

Work out your own break-even in two minutes

You need three numbers: what a typical job is worth to you in labour and parts margin, how many enquiries you turn into jobs, and what the channel charges.

Take a worked example. An MOT on its own is capped by law, and the DVSA maximum for a Class 4 car is £54.85, so nobody is getting rich on the test alone. Say the test brings £54.85, and roughly half of the cars you test need something doing, averaging £120 of additional work at your margin. Blend those and each MOT customer is worth around £115. At a £10 lead fee and a one-in-three conversion, your cost per won job is £30, which is about a quarter of the value. That works.

Now run the same maths at £40 a lead and a one-in-five conversion. Your cost per won job is £200 against £115 of value, and you are paying for the privilege of doing the work. Same trade, same garage, and the only things that changed were the fee and the conversion rate. This is why what an MOT can be charged at and what your servicing work is worth belong in the same conversation as your marketing spend.

Why the cheapest lead is often the expensive one

Three things quietly wreck the maths on bargain leads.

Sharing. If the same enquiry goes to four garages, you are in a race rather than a conversation, and your conversion rate can halve. Price a shared lead as though you will win half as often, and it usually stops looking cheap.

No right to decline. If you cannot turn down a clutch job when you have no ramp free until next week, you are paying for enquiries you were never going to serve. The ability to decline without penalty is worth real money and is rarely priced into the headline figure.

Contact quality. A lead with no registration, a mistyped number or a driver who does not remember enquiring is not a lead, it is an invoice. Before you commit to any platform, ask what proportion of leads are contactable and what happens when one is not.

What a lead is actually worth after the first job

Most garages price a lead against one job, which undersells it badly. Cars need an MOT on a fixed cycle: GOV.UK requires one by the third anniversary of registration, then on the anniversary of the last MOT every year after that. A driver who has a good experience has a reason to come back on a known date, every year, without you spending anything to bring them.

Set that against the fee. If a £10 lead becomes a customer who returns for three annual MOTs and a service or two, the acquisition cost across the relationship is a rounding error. That is the honest case for paying for leads at all, and it is also the case for treating the first job as the audition. The garages that win on this model are the ones whose work and manner make people come back.

The cost after tax

One number that rarely makes it into the comparison: lead fees are a business cost. HMRC lists advertising or marketing among allowable expenses, so this spend normally reduces your taxable profit like any other marketing cost. The effective cost of a £10 lead is therefore lower than £10 once relief is taken into account, and how much lower depends on how your business is structured. Your accountant will tell you exactly where you stand, but it is worth remembering that the invoice is not the final figure.

Published prices, and the ones you cannot see

Here is the thing that stands out when you actually go and read the pricing pages, as we did for this guide. Two of the four options above cannot be modelled before you sign. BookMyGarage publishes a monthly figure but not a per-booking cost, and its standard listing sends you to an enquiry form. FixMyCar publishes the joining fee but not the success-fee rate. Both are established businesses with real audiences and neither is doing anything unusual by industry standards.

But it does mean that if you want to know your cost per won job before you commit, you can only calculate it where every component is published. That is a deliberate choice on our side rather than a happy accident, because a garage owner should be able to do this sum at the kitchen table on a Sunday night without ringing a salesperson first.

What we charge

YourCarGarage Founding Members pay £10 a month plus £10 for each approved lead, and both prices are locked in for life. The lead fee only applies to leads you accept, so declining one that does not suit your diary costs nothing, and a quiet month costs you the £10 membership and nothing more.

Put that through the same table as everything else. At one in three conversion, that is £30 per won job. At one in two, £20. Those numbers are on this page because you should be able to check our claim rather than take it on trust. See how it works for garages, or find the listing that already exists for your business and claim it.