How much do insurance leads cost?

Auto insurance leads run roughly $20 to $50 each according to AgencyMVP, and agents on r/InsuranceAgent report paying $35 to $42 with around 10% conversion. Other lines are priced by the same machinery but almost nobody publishes real numbers. The price is set by an auction, so ranges are honest and precise quotes are not.

Why is there no price list for insurance leads?

Because leads are not a product with a rate card. They are the output of an auction. Every vendor prices per filter set, per state, per line, and adjusts as demand shifts. Two agents buying the same lead type in the same week can pay materially different amounts because they picked different counties.

The published numbers we can stand behind are narrow. AgencyMVP puts professionally generated auto insurance leads at roughly $20 to $50 each. Agents posting on r/InsuranceAgent report paying $35 to $42 per auto lead and converting around 10% of them. That is the sourced floor and ceiling for the most commoditised line in the business.

For home, commercial, and trucking, there is no equivalent published figure we would repeat as fact. Anyone handing you a tidy table of per-line CPLs assembled it from memory. What we can tell you honestly is what moves the price.

What actually drives the price of an insurance lead?

Five things set the number: the line of business, how many agents the lead is sold to, how old it is, where the prospect lives, and how many other buyers are bidding for that same person right now. Change any one and the price moves. None of them is negotiable with the vendor.

1. Line of business. Premium size sets the ceiling. Commercial and trucking leads cost more than personal auto because one bound account is worth many times a monoline auto policy. Auto is the cheapest because the audience is enormous and the commission is small.
2. Exclusivity. A shared lead is sold to several agents at once. An exclusive lead is sold to one. The exclusive costs a multiple of the shared price, and whether that multiple pays for itself is the subject of shared vs. exclusive insurance leads.
3. Freshness. A lead delivered seconds after the form submit is worth more than the same record thirty days later, because intent decays fast. Aged leads sell at a steep discount for exactly this reason.
4. Geography. Dense metro ZIPs with many competing agencies cost more than rural counties. Catastrophe markets swing hard: when a carrier non-renews a county, the whole county goes in-market at once and the auction reprices overnight.
5. Auction competition. This is the one agents forget. You are not paying a vendor a fee, you are outbidding other agents. Open enrollment periods, carrier pullouts, and a national brand raising its budget all move your cost without anyone telling you.

How do lead types compare on price?

Five sources dominate: shared, exclusive, aged, live transfer, and self-generated. They differ less on headline price than on what you own once the transaction ends. The last column is the one most agents never think about until year two.

What do leads cost by line of business?

Only auto has a price we can source. Everything else, we describe by relative position rather than invent a figure. The ordering below is driven by premium size and audience depth, and it holds across vendors even though the absolute numbers do not.

Why is cost per lead the wrong number to shop on?

Because you do not bank leads, you bank policies. Cost per lead is what a vendor charges. Cost per bound policy is what your business actually pays, and the two diverge sharply once contact rate, quote rate, and bind rate are applied. Cheap leads with a bad close rate are an expensive way to write business.

A lead that costs half as much and closes at a third of the rate is worse, not better. The arithmetic is straightforward and most agents never run it. We walk through it step by step, with the assumed inputs clearly labelled so you can swap in your own, on cost per lead vs. cost per bound policy.

One agent's summary on r/InsuranceAgent gets at why the price is only half the story: “Internet leads are price shoppers. Even if you are good enough to win a few, they will jump ship as soon as a lower price comes their way.” A cheap policy that lapses in eight months was never cheap.

What does it cost to generate your own leads instead?

It costs your ad spend plus management, and it starts more expensive than buying. Meta needs roughly 50 conversions per ad set per week to exit the learning phase, so week-one costs are not steady-state costs. The trade is that the number falls over time instead of drifting up.

Our own pricing is public and flat: $700 setup, $500 a month, no percentage of spend. Ad spend is separate and goes to Meta from your own account. Month one costs more than month three, we will not promise you a lead volume, and we are new. Those are real downsides and we would rather you read them here than find them later.

What you get in exchange is ownership. The account, the pixel, the audience data, and every lead stay yours whether or not you keep paying us. That is the actual argument, and it is laid out against the vendors in insurance lead generation companies and by source in the best insurance leads for agents. If auto is your line, start with auto insurance leads.

How should you budget before you know your numbers?

Budget by the number of conversations you need, not the number of leads you can afford. Work backwards from your target bound policies, apply honest contact and close rates, and give any new channel a defined test window rather than a monthly drip. Three weeks of real spend beats six months of dabbling.

1. Decide how many bound policies you need per month.
2. Apply your real close rate on the leads you already work, not the vendor's.
3. That gives you a lead count. Multiply by the price you have actually been quoted.
4. Set a test budget that reaches that lead count inside 3–4 weeks, not spread thin over a quarter.
5. Measure cost per bound policy at the end, and only then compare sources.

If you want us to run the ads instead, the application is here. It takes a minute and it tells us whether we are a fit before either of us spends money.