Cost per booked job calculator
Cost per booked job is total ad spend divided by jobs actually closed — not by leads. Spend $6,000 and close 11 jobs and it’s $545 per job. The gap between your cost per lead and this number is what your set, show, and close rates are really costing you.
Enter one month of numbers
Ad spend plus management fees, CRM and any per-lead costs.
Every form fill and inbound call, before any qualification.
Slots that made it onto the calendar.
Homeowner actually present and pitched.
Signed contracts from those appointments.
You are paying 10.9x your cost per lead for every job you actually sign.
What the ad platform will happily report.
Every no-show pushes this away from the number above.
17 appointments paid for and never attended. None of it is recoverable.
Same spend and same close rate, $154.04 cheaper per job. No extra ad budget required.
How to use this calculator
Take one month and fill in five numbers: what you spent, how many leads came in, how many became appointments, how many of those appointments the homeowner actually attended, and how many became signed jobs. Everything else is derived. The results update as you type.
Include more than ad spend in the first box. Management fees, CRM and dialler subscriptions and any per-lead purchase costs are all costs of acquiring the job. Leaving them out is the most common reason a channel looks cheaper on a spreadsheet than it feels in the bank account.
A worked example
A roofing company spends $6,000 in a month and gets 120 leads. That is a cost per lead of $50, which sounds fine, and it is the number most owners stop at.
Of those 120 leads, 48 become appointments. Cost per appointment is now $125. Of the 48 appointments, 31 actually happen — a 65% show rate — so cost per appointment that a salesperson genuinely sat through is $194. Eleven of those close, giving a true cost per booked job of $545.
The $50 lead and the $545 job are the same campaign. Nothing went wrong with the ads. The eleven-fold difference is entirely the funnel, and none of it is visible in an ad account.
The number most contractors never calculate
Seventeen of those 48 appointments never happened. At $125 per appointment, that is $2,125 spent on calendar slots that produced nothing — more than a third of the month's marketing budget, gone before anyone got a chance to sell. Add the drive time and the salesperson's day and the real figure is worse.
This is why the show rate line matters more than the lead line. Buying 20% more leads costs 20% more money. Lifting show rate from 65% to 90% costs a text-message sequence, and in the example above it takes cost per booked job from $545 to roughly $391 without spending another dollar on ads.
Reading your own results
- Lead to appointment is low. Usually a targeting or qualification problem — renters, out-of-area enquiries, people shopping a job they cannot fund — or nobody calling fast enough.
- Set to show is low. Almost always follow-up. Slow first contact, no confirmation sequence, appointments booked too far out.
- Show to close is low. Either the sales process, or leads being pushed to appointment before they were qualified, which moves the problem downstream rather than solving it.
- All three look reasonable but cost per job is still high. The channel is genuinely expensive for your market. That is a budget and targeting conversation, not a funnel one.
Judging the result
Cost per booked job only means something against average job value and margin. A $545 acquisition cost on a $14,000 roof replacement is under four percent of revenue, which is comfortable in most trades. The same $545 on a $900 repair is a business losing money on every job it wins. Work out acquisition cost as a percentage of gross profit per job, and set a ceiling from that rather than from a published benchmark.
For the simpler revenue-side view of the same spend, use the ROAS calculator. For why the set-to-show number moves the most, speed to lead covers the mechanics, and exclusive versus shared leads explains why cheap leads often carry the worst funnel numbers. This is the system we build for clients: automated follow-up is what moves show rate.
Common questions
What is cost per booked job?
Cost per booked job is total marketing spend divided by the number of jobs actually signed in the same period. It is the only cost metric that reflects money in the bank, because it counts the outcome the business gets paid for rather than an intermediate step. Six thousand dollars of ad spend producing eleven signed jobs is a cost per booked job of roughly $545.
Why is cost per lead a misleading number for contractors?
Cost per lead measures how cheaply you can get a phone number, not how cheaply you can get a job. Two campaigns can produce identical leads at identical cost while one books three times as many jobs, because the leads differ in whether they own the home, can fund the work, or intend to buy this year. Cheap leads that never turn into sit-downs are more expensive than costly leads that do.
What is the difference between an appointment set and an appointment that showed?
An appointment set is a slot on the calendar. An appointment that showed is a homeowner who was actually there when the salesperson arrived. The gap between them is pure loss: the ad spend has been paid, the drive time has been spent, and nothing is recoverable. This is usually the largest single leak in a contractor funnel and the one owners are least likely to be measuring.
Where do most contractors lose money in the funnel?
Almost always between setting an appointment and having someone show up for it, and then again between showing and closing. Lead volume gets the attention because it is the number the ad platform reports, but a business converting leads to appointments well and then losing a third of those appointments to no-shows is paying for jobs it never gets a chance to sell. Fixing show rate is usually cheaper than buying more leads.
How do you improve show rate?
Speed of first contact does most of the work, followed by confirmation sequences. A homeowner contacted within a minute of enquiring is far more likely to remember booking and to attend than one contacted the next morning. Text confirmation at the time of booking, a reminder the day before, and a further message the morning of the appointment address the rest, because most no-shows are forgetfulness or cooling interest rather than deliberate cancellation.
What should cost per booked job be?
It should be a fraction of gross profit per job that leaves the business profitable after overhead. A useful way to frame it is as a percentage of average job value: a business averaging fourteen thousand dollars per job and spending five hundred to acquire it is spending under four percent of revenue on acquisition, which is comfortable in most trades. There is no universal target, because job value and margin vary enormously between trades and markets.
Should marketing spend include agency fees and software?
For a true cost per booked job, yes. Ad platform spend, management fees, CRM and dialler subscriptions, and any per-lead purchase costs all belong in the numerator, because all of them are costs of acquiring the job. Many contractors calculate the number using ad spend alone, which understates acquisition cost and makes channels look better than they are. Use the full figure when deciding whether marketing is working.
How long a period should be measured?
A month is the usual unit, but the sales cycle has to be accounted for. If jobs typically close three weeks after the first enquiry, jobs signed in a given month were largely generated by the previous month spend, and dividing this month spend by this month jobs will mislead in either direction whenever budget changes. Either match cohorts by lead date or use a rolling ninety-day window, which smooths most of the distortion.
Keep going
The simpler view: revenue divided by ad spend, as a ratio and a percentage, plus your break-even.
Free tool Max Cost Per Lead CalculatorThe other direction: the most you can pay per lead and still make money at your job value and margin.
Free tool Conversion Rate CalculatorOnce you know which stage is leaking, work out what fixing that one rate is actually worth.
Know where the leak is.
Now close it.
We fix the show rate and the ad spend both — 20 qualified appointments in 30 days, guaranteed in writing.
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