How Much Does Thumbtack Charge for Leads? A 2026 Guide for Contractors

Thumbtack's own pages, checked November 8, 2026:

Budget, fee and payment rules sit in a separate document the Terms incorporate, the "Budget, Fees, Payments and Taxes Terms," published in Thumbtack's help center.

Thumbtack's help center adds that lead prices vary with the type and size of the job, how many pros are available and your market, and that a Thumbtack administrator's April 2026 forum note matches it: discounts and promotions are the only exception to the price you set.

• Direct leads. When a customer contacts you from search results and the job matches your job preferences, Thumbtack's help center says you "auto-pay for the lead." Housecall Pro's guide (May 5, 2026) adds that once you hit your weekly budget, these leads stop until you raise the limit.
• Opportunities (open leads). Prices show upfront, you contact the customer first, and Thumbtack says you "only pay the price shown if the customer responds to you."

The practical point for a roofer or painter: a matched lead is billed when it arrives. Since Thumbtack’s Quality Commitment Terms were updated on September 28, 2026, that charge is refunded automatically if the customer replies to no pro within 72 hours. If the customer talks to another pro and never to you, the charge stands.

Thumbtack publishes no price list by trade, because you set the prices. Two outside sources give ranges: Housecall Pro says pros report $10 to more than $100 per lead depending on trade, job size and market, and LeadCapture's 2023 analysis put home improvement contractors at $10 to $50.

Pros in Thumbtack's community post their own charges. These are individual reports, dated:

The August 2025 poster's complaint is worth knowing: leads are priced by the hours of work, but customers message based on a budget range, so a lead can cost more than the profit on a one-hour job. The July 2026 poster later wrote that discoveries about their own lead price settings "almost definitely inflated" those numbers.

What drives the price?

Your settings, first. ArvinC's April 2026 post says "your lead prices tell us which jobs are most important to you," so a high price on a service pulls more of that work. When pros complain, moderators send them back to the same dial: in May 2023 DustiO advised an electrician to lower his "Max Lead Price to a price you feel comfortable paying," and in July 2026 told the furniture-assembly pro his prices were "set pretty high" with "a lot of room to experiment with lowering those prices."

You pay for every lead, so:

Cost per won job = lead price ÷ win rate

Win rate is the share of paid leads that become paid jobs. The inputs below are examples; swap in your own lead prices from your dashboard and your own win rate.

Now hold that against gross profit, not job value.

Half the profit on that repaint goes to lead spend. At a 30% win rate the share drops to 35%. At 10% the leads cost $500, more than the $480 profit.

Weekly budget example

• Weekly budget $300 at $50 a lead: 6 leads a week
• 15% win rate: 0.9 jobs a week
• Per month (4.33 weeks): about $1,300 spent, 26 leads, 3.9 jobs, $333 per won job
• At 15 minutes to read, call and quote each lead: 6.5 hours of quoting a month, most of it on jobs you do not get

Work backward from the job. Decide what share of gross profit you will spend to win a job, then:

Max lead price = gross profit per job × win rate × share of profit you will spend

The table assumes you will spend 25% of gross profit (an example input; pick your own).

Read it this way: if your win rate on repaints is 20%, any lead price above $24 eats more than a quarter of your profit. On a $4,000-profit tear-off, a $100 lead is cheap even at a 10% close rate.

A 30-lead test before you judge Thumbtack

1. Turn off every service you do not want, and set a separate max lead price for each one you keep.
2. Set a weekly budget you can lose for 6 to 8 weeks without it hurting.
3. Log every lead in a sheet: date, service, lead price, minutes to first reply, quoted (yes/no), won (yes/no), job value, gross profit.
4. Answer during work hours. If nobody can reply from the roof or the job site, the test measures your phone habits, not Thumbtack.
5. Stop at 30 paid leads. At a 20% win rate that is about 6 jobs, enough to see a pattern.
6. Compare cost per won job by service with the max lead price table, then cut, lower or raise each service.

Sometimes, and only inside a narrow policy. Thumbtack's Terms of Use say fees are final and non-refundable except as described in the Terms or the Refund Policy, and its "Refund policy for pros" help article says all refunds are made at Thumbtack's sole discretion.

How refunds are paid matters for cash flow. Approved refunds go to your Thumbtack balance by default. To get money back on your card, you must ask within 10 business days of the approval, and courtesy credits, prepaid credit packages and promotional balances cannot go back to a card at all. Thumbtack says most requests get an answer within 24 to 48 hours, up to four days if they need review, and an approved refund also lifts that week's budget by the refunded amount.

The practical lesson: a customer who goes silent on every pro is now refunded after 72 hours, but a customer who talks to another pro or hires one is not. Price your leads assuming you pay for every lead you lose to a competitor.

From the Terms themselves:

• If your account is terminated, you are not entitled to a refund of any fees.
• After termination you can no longer redeem prepaid packages or credits from a promotion.
• Promotions are at Thumbtack's discretion, can be revoked at any time, and are not redeemable for cash unless the law requires it.

That replaces an older forum answer: in March 2025, administrator DustiO wrote that nothing in the refund policy or Terms covered non-responsive customers, "so those would not be eligible for a refund." Under the Quality Commitment Terms, a customer who replies to no pro within 72 hours now triggers an automatic refund.

How do refund rules compare with other lead sources?

More on Networx in our Networx leads review. For Angi’s credit rules, see our Angi leads review.

Trade-specific breakdowns: where painting contractors get leads and roofing lead generation companies compared. For Thumbtack against Angi on price, sharing and refunds, see Thumbtack vs Angi.

Sourci is a lead generation agency in Austin, Texas for painting, flooring, epoxy and coatings, roofing and general contractors. Sourci never sells or shares leads, so there is no lead price and no other pro quoting the same homeowner. The full model is on our contractor lead generation services page.

Inbound (website, SEO and AI-search visibility; residential and commercial):

• Foundation: $1,950 a month + $1,000 onboarding. 4 new or improved pages a month and a monthly ChatGPT, Google AI and Perplexity check on 24 buyer questions.
• Growth: $3,450 a month + $1,500 onboarding. 8 new or improved pages a month across two services or markets, and 48 buyer questions tracked.

Outbound (researched email outreach to property managers, facilities teams and commercial owners, with every interested reply qualified and handed to you; commercial only):

• Foundation: $2,950 a month, up to 500 researched buyers a month.
• Growth: $4,450 a month, up to 1,000 researched buyers across two segments.

Month-to-month, 30 days' notice. Ads management is not included. A commercial painting contractor in Dallas, Texas grew revenue 234% and website visitors 657% in six months of Sourci's SEO and AI-search work: read the Dallas commercial painter case study.

Get a free AI-search check to see whether ChatGPT and Google recommend you or a marketplace when buyers ask for a contractor in your area.

• Thumbtack, pro page "Find more customers for your business"
• Thumbtack, Terms of Use (last updated July 10, 2026)
• Thumbtack for Professionals, App Store listing
• Thumbtack for Professionals, Google Play listing
• Thumbtack Help, "Refund policy for pros," checked November 8, 2026
• Thumbtack Help, "Thumbtack’s Quality Commitment Terms" (last updated September 28, 2026), checked November 9, 2026
• Thumbtack Help, "How much do I pay for leads and opportunities?," checked November 8, 2026
• Thumbtack Help, "Budget, Fees, Payments and Taxes Terms"
• Thumbtack Community, "How to set the right lead budget as a new pro," administrator ArvinC, April 9, 2026
• Thumbtack Community, "Are Opportunity Leads prominently seen by the customer?", administrator DustiO, April 20, 2026
• Thumbtack Community, "Refund Possible? Lead isn't responding," administrator DustiO, March 18, 2025
• Thumbtack Community, "How Leads are priced," pro post July 25, 2026 and administrator reply July 30, 2026
• Thumbtack Community, "Why does the lead cost more than the job?!", pro post and administrator reply, May 2023
• Thumbtack Community, "Which lead system works better for your business?", pro posts, August 2025
• Housecall Pro, "What is Thumbtack and how does it work" (May 5, 2026)
• LeadCapture, "Is Thumbtack Worth It in 2023?"
• Local Services Help, "How leads work"
• Local Services Help, "About Automated Local Services Ads lead credits"
• Networx Help Center, "How much do leads cost?"
• Networx Help Center, "When/How am I billed?"
• Networx Help Center, "Lead Credit Policy"
• Google Business Profile Help, "Tips to improve your local ranking on Google"

Checked November 2026.