Quick answer
There is no honest single price for HVAC leads in Australia, because a lead is not the thing you are buying. What matters is cost per booked quote: total spend divided by qualified homeowners booked into your diary. Our planning assumption across Meta and Google Search is $100 to $130 per enquiry, about $320 in ad spend per booked quote and about $550 all-in with our fee.
Ask what HVAC leads cost in Australia and you will get a number. Someone will say $40, someone else $150, and a lead seller will quote whatever makes their product look good. None of those numbers will tell you whether a channel is making you money.
This post explains why cost per lead misleads, walks through the chain from enquiry to won job, shows our planning maths, and gives you a formula to work out your own numbers. We quote marketplace prices only where we read them on the marketplace's own pages. Everything else is a labelled planning assumption.
Why is cost per lead the wrong number for HVAC?
Cost per lead counts every form fill and phone call the same, whether it is a homeowner ready for a ducted system or a renter asking about a portable unit. It ignores tyre-kickers, duplicates and shared leads. Two channels with the same cost per lead can produce very different numbers of jobs.
A lead is anyone who enquires. That includes people outside your area, people who want a price over the phone and never answer again, and people who filled in a form by accident. On a dashboard they all look the same. In your diary they do not.
The number that matters is cost per booked quote. A booked quote is a qualified homeowner booked in for an in-home quote, in your diary, with a time. It is the first point in the chain where you know a real person, in a real house, wants a real price from you.
What is the chain from lead to won job?
Every HVAC enquiry passes through four stages: lead, qualified, booked and won. Each stage loses some people. The cost at each stage is your total spend divided by the number who reach it, so the cost rises at every step. The drops between stages tell you where money is leaking.
| Stage | What it means | What decides the drop | Who controls it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lead | Anyone who enquires | Ad, offer, targeting | Marketing |
| Qualified | Passes your questions: owner, right property, right job, budget, timing | Qualifier questions, offer honesty | Marketing and you |
| Booked quote | In your diary with a time | Speed to reply, who answers, availability | Your office or ours |
| Won job | Signed and deposit paid | Price, the site visit, follow-up | You |
The trap is optimising the top of the chain. A cheaper lead that drops out at qualified or booked is not cheaper. A more expensive lead that books and closes can be the best money you spend.
What do HVAC leads cost under our planning assumptions?
At $4,000 a month of combined Meta and Google Search spend, our planning assumptions give about 35 enquiries, 21 qualified homeowners and 12 to 13 booked quotes. That is about $320 of ad spend per booked quote, or about $550 all-in once our $3,000 monthly fee is added. These are assumptions, not results.
We are a new business with no clients yet, so these numbers are not from a case study. They are the assumptions we use to plan a campaign and to decide whether it is worth running. Here is how they fit together.
Worked example: the planning funnel at $4,000 a month (assumptions, not results)
Ad spend: $4,000 (paid by the installer directly, default split Meta $2,500 and Google Search $1,500)
Leads: $4,000 / $100 to $130 assumed blended cost per enquiry = about 31 to 40, call it about 35
Qualified: 35 x 60% assumed pass rate = about 21
Booked quotes: 21 x 60% assumed booking rate = about 12 to 13
Ad cost per booked quote: $4,000 / 12.5 = about $320
All-in cost: $4,000 spend + $3,000 fee = $7,000
All-in cost per booked quote: $7,000 / 12.5 = about $560, call it about $550
Jobs at our planning close rate of 30%: 12.5 x 30% = about 3 to 4 a month
Expected gross profit per booked ducted quote: about $800 to $1,800
Break-even: $7,000 / about $3,500 gross profit per ducted job = about 2 ducted jobs a month
The point of the example is not the $100 to $130. Your real cost per lead might be higher or lower. The point is that even at a cost per lead that sounds expensive, a booked ducted quote worth $800 to $1,800 in expected gross profit can carry it comfortably. The same maths does not work for split systems, where our planning range is $200 to $550 of expected gross profit per quote.
How do you calculate your own cost per booked quote?
Add up everything a channel cost you in a month, including ad spend, subscriptions and agency fees. Divide by the number of quotes it booked into your diary. Then divide the same total by jobs won to get cost per won job. Track it by source for at least eight weeks before drawing conclusions.
You need four numbers per source, per month. Most CRMs, including a basic spreadsheet, can give you them if every enquiry is tagged with where it came from.
The formula
Cost per lead = total cost / leads
Cost per qualified lead = total cost / qualified leads
Cost per booked quote = total cost / booked quotes
Cost per won job = total cost / jobs won
Return per booked quote = (jobs won x average gross profit) / booked quotes
If return per booked quote is higher than cost per booked quote, the source is paying for itself. If it is lower, find the stage with the biggest drop and fix that before you spend more.
A practical note: include your own time. If a marketplace lead takes three calls to reach and half of them want a phone price, that is office time you are paying for, even if it is not on an invoice.
What drives HVAC lead costs up?
Five things push the cost per booked quote up: the season, the suburb, a weak offer, tired creative and slow replies. Some you cannot control, like a mild summer. Most you can. Speed to lead is the cheapest fix, because a slow reply wastes every dollar you already spent getting the enquiry.
Season
Demand for cooling in Sydney climbs with the first hot weeks and falls away in autumn. More installers tend to advertise in peak months, so auctions get more competitive. Winter brings heating enquiries for reverse cycle systems, but fewer ducted installs. We plan budgets around this, which we cover in how much to spend on HVAC marketing.
Suburb
Some suburbs have more owner-occupied homes with room for ducted, more competitors advertising and more homeowners who can afford a $10,500 to $16,500 system (our Sydney planning range for a 3 to 4 bedroom install). Western Sydney and the Inner West, for example, have different housing and different summers, so the same ad can cost very different amounts per booked quote in each. Our Western Sydney HVAC marketing page goes into the local detail.
Offer
An ad with no reason to act this week costs more per booked quote than one with a real offer. The NSW Energy Savings Scheme discount comes off the quote upfront, indicatively up to $550 for a new 6kW system and up to $560 replacing an old unit with a 6kW split (NSW Climate and Energy Action). A free in-home heat-load assessment and a real install-by date are the other two we use.
Creative
The same ad shown to the same suburb for months gets ignored, and cost rises. Real photos of your vans, crew and installs, refreshed every few weeks, hold costs down better than stock images.
Speed to lead
A homeowner who enquires at 7:40pm and hears back the next afternoon has often already booked someone else. Every hour of delay turns a paid enquiry into a wasted one. We reply by SMS and call inside 60 seconds, which is why we treat speed to lead as part of the cost, not an extra.
Are exclusive HVAC leads better than shared leads?
Exclusive leads go to one installer. Shared leads go to several, who all ring the same homeowner. Shared leads can look cheaper per lead, but you should plan on a lower close rate and more price pressure. For ducted and multi-head work, exclusive enquiries usually give a lower cost per won job.
The best-known shared lead marketplace for Australian trades is hipages. On its own pages, it says no more than three tradies can accept a job lead unless the homeowner and tradie agree on waitlisting (hipages FAQs). It also lists some categories with "maximum 1 accept" leads, where only one tradie gets the customer's contact details.
hipages publishes its monthly plans. As listed on its membership costs page when we checked in September 2026:
- Starter: $139 + GST a month, 155 credits a month, 1 postcode
- Advanced: $249 + GST a month, 310 credits a month, 3 postcodes
- Premium: $449 + GST a month, 595 credits a month, 5 postcodes
- Platinum: $649 + GST a month, 850 credits a month, 10 postcodes
The page says new members join on a 6 month introductory term that automatically renews on a 12 month term. What hipages does not publish is how many credits an aircon lead uses. Its FAQ says credit amounts depend on trade category, location, supply and demand and job size, and can change daily, weekly or monthly. So the real cost per aircon lead on hipages is not something we can state, and anyone who quotes you one should show you where it came from.
The fair way to compare a shared source with an exclusive one is cost per won job. If three installers quote the same homeowner, your close rate will usually be lower than on a homeowner who only asked you. Plug your own close rates into the formula above and the comparison becomes obvious. We go further in HVAC lead sources ranked by cost per booked quote.
What should an HVAC business pay for leads?
Pay whatever keeps your cost per booked quote well below the expected gross profit of a booked quote. For ducted work, our planning range for that expected gross profit is $800 to $1,800. For split systems, it is $200 to $550, which is why paid leads for single splits rarely make sense.
This is why we do not work with single-split installers or businesses that buy leads by the unit. The maths only works when the job is big enough. For a 3 to 12 van installer doing mostly ducted and multi-head, a booked quote that costs a few hundred dollars all-in is a good trade, provided the quotes are exclusive, qualified and followed up.
Our own pricing is published: $3,000 a month plus GST, with the client paying Meta and Google directly at a minimum of $4,000 a month combined. The first 90 days are split into two payments of $4,500: one on signing, and the second once you have won 3 jobs from quotes we booked, or at day 60, whichever comes first. On your numbers, about two ducted jobs a month covers everything you'd spend with us, fee and ads. Anything past that is yours. There is no setup fee beyond the first payment and no guarantee. The full breakdown is on our pricing page and our Google Ads for HVAC page.
How often should you review your lead costs?
Review cost per booked quote weekly and make decisions monthly. A single week can swing with the weather, a public holiday or one lucky job. Four weeks of data by source is the minimum before you cut or scale a channel. Eight weeks is better for ducted, because quotes take time to close.
We send a report every Friday with three numbers: booked quotes, cost per booked quote and jobs won. That is deliberately short. If those three are heading the right way, the rest is detail. If they are not, the funnel table above tells you which stage to look at first.
Sources
Sam
Sam runs every audit and buys every ad. Before going HVAC-only, he ran Scale Theory as a performance marketing agency: SEO, Meta and Google ads, CRM automation.
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