Average Cost Per Lead by Industry and on LinkedIn (2026 Data)

The average cost per lead by industry in 2026 runs from $26.84 to $131.63 for Google search ads (all-industry median $66.69, WordStream by LocaliQ) and from $96 to $970 for blended B2B marketing (First Page Sage, updated October 8, 2026). On LinkedIn, the best measured benchmark is $202 per lead on a spend-weighted basis and $376 for the median advertiser, across 138 B2B advertisers and 2025 spend (Metadata). LinkedIn itself publishes no average cost per lead.

Those numbers are not contradictory. Each source divides a different cost by a different kind of lead. The table below says what each one measures, so you compare your own number with the right one.

Average cost per lead by industry: 30 industries, paid vs organic (2026)

First Page Sage is the only public source that publishes a blended cost per lead for 30 industries with a stated formula. Its method, as published: cost per lead is “the gross marketing cost required to acquire one lead,” calculated as total marketing spend divided by the new leads from a channel. The blended figure is weighted by the share of leads each channel type produced in that industry. The data is First Page Sage’s agency client data from January 2022 through August 2026. The page does not state a sample size or say whether salaries and agency fees sit inside “marketing spend.”

Source: First Page Sage, Average Cost Per Lead by Industry, updated October 8, 2026. Change column as published by First Page Sage.

What the table tells you:

• Organic is cheaper in 28 of 30 industries. The exceptions are Staffing and Recruiting ($543 organic vs $511 paid) and Pharmaceutical ($148 vs $126). Keep in mind that First Page Sage is an SEO agency reporting its own clients.
• Organic got dearer faster. Organic CPL rose in every industry from 2025 to 2026, by 2.7% to 13.4%, while paid CPL fell in 15 of 30. Legal Services organic leads rose 12.4%.
• Sector averages hide a 10x spread. First Page Sage’s sector rollups run from $172 for Consumer and Local Services to $970 for Education, with Financial and Professional Services at $554.

If you see older figures quoted elsewhere, such as $653 for financial services or $237 for B2B SaaS, those are this same report’s 2025 values. The stage-by-stage conversion rates that sit behind these leads are broken out in our lead generation statistics.

Google search ads cost per lead by industry (2026 benchmarks)

For paid search alone, the standard reference is the WordStream by LocaliQ 2026 Search Advertising Benchmarks. Per WordStream’s “About the data” note, it is “a sample of 13,474 US-based search advertising campaigns running between Apr 1, 2025, and March 31, 2026,” with at least 52 campaigns per category, and the “averages” are “technically median figures to account for outliers.” The all-industry cost per lead fell to $66.69, which WordStream calls the first decline in five years.

Source: LocaliQ Search Advertising Benchmarks, last updated June 1, 2026. Each column is its own median across campaigns, so CPC divided by conversion rate will not reproduce the cost per lead column. Year-over-year change for every cell, plus the 2025 and 2024 editions, is in our Google Ads CPC by industry breakdown.

Facebook lead campaigns run cheaper per lead in the same vendor’s data: $27.39 across industries at an 8.54% conversion rate, from $12.30 in Career and Employment to $61.56 in Dentists and Dental Services (LocaliQ Facebook benchmarks, updated September 23, 2026). There is no Finance and Insurance, Legal or Business Services row in that lead table, and an in-platform form lead is a lighter commitment than a search click that fills in your own form.

Average cost per lead on LinkedIn: what LinkedIn publishes and what the data shows

Start with what LinkedIn itself says, because most “LinkedIn CPL” figures online trace to nothing. LinkedIn publishes three relevant numbers and no average cost per lead:

• Budget floors. “The minimum daily budget amount required to start on LinkedIn is $10, for any ad format,” the minimum lifetime budget for a new campaign is $100, and LinkedIn suggests $25 a day for new advertisers paying in USD (LinkedIn, Maximize your budget).
• Lead Gen Form conversion rate. “The average LinkedIn Lead Gen Form conversion rate is 13%,” against a 4.02% average landing page rate LinkedIn attributes to Unbounce (LinkedIn Marketing Blog, August 19, 2025). No sample, period or method is given.
• Cost per lead reporting. The same post says Lead Gen Forms “automatically keep track of and report on Cost Per Lead,” but it gives no values.

The strongest measured benchmark is Metadata’s 2026 B2B Paid Media Benchmark. Metadata is a B2B paid media platform, and the data is its own customers: 153 B2B advertisers that ran $57.6M of paid media through it in calendar 2025, 69.6% of it on LinkedIn (methodology). Cost per lead is “spend on lead-generation campaigns divided by the leads they produced,” spend-weighted, so the biggest spenders count most. A cut is published only with at least 5 advertisers and $50,000 of spend, and no advertiser can be more than half of it.

Source: Metadata, LinkedIn ads cost for B2B (138 advertisers for the headline figures; the published percentile distribution covers 88). So the honest answer to “what is the average cost per lead on LinkedIn” has two parts: $202 if you weight by spend, $376 if you ask what the middle advertiser paid. Metadata’s own finding 03 tells readers to benchmark against $376.

LinkedIn ads cost per lead by format, destination and audience

Source: Metadata and its published dataset (CC BY 4.0), 2025 spend. Two findings run against common advice. A landing page lead cost 79% more than a Lead Gen Form lead. And LinkedIn retargeting was dearer per lead than prospecting, the reverse of Facebook in the same data ($120 retargeting vs $166 prospecting).

LinkedIn ads cost per lead vs Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram for B2B

Source: Metadata B2B advertising benchmarks, spend-weighted. Note the $524 Google Ads figure for B2B advertisers against LocaliQ’s $66.69 for mostly local and small-business search advertisers: same platform, different buyers and a different lead definition. Cheap leads are not cheap customers either. Across the 94 advertisers with CRM data, a customer won through LinkedIn lead-gen cost $58,572, at a 19.5% close rate on closed opportunities; for companies under 200 employees it was $30,739.

Work out your own LinkedIn cost per lead before you spend

Because LinkedIn will not give you an average, build the estimate from your own bid and form rate: cost per lead = CPC divided by click-to-lead rate. Campaign Manager shows a suggested bid range for each campaign; use that as your CPC. The table uses Metadata’s $9.39 B2B average CPC as a stand-in:

Two things fall out of the math. First, LinkedIn’s 13% claim implies a CPL about a third of what B2B advertisers actually measured, so do not plan on it. Second, at the $10 daily minimum you get roughly two leads a month at a measured conversion rate, too few to tell a good ad from a bad one. Metadata publishes each metric as its own aggregate, so $9.39 divided by 5.9% ($159) does not reproduce its measured $202; plan with the measured CPL and use the formula to see how your own CPC and form rate move it. The campaign setup behind these numbers is covered in our LinkedIn B2B marketing playbook.

Cost per lead benchmarks for financial services

Financial services is the most expensive B2B category in most datasets, but the spread between sources is wide, and no source with a stated method publishes a cost per lead for retail banking. Here is every sourced figure we could verify, side by side:

How to read it for your firm:

• Insurance agencies and consumer lenders buying search clicks should compare against the $74.44 search median, not the B2B figures. LocaliQ blends finance and insurance into one category, so a personal lines agency and a mortgage broker share that row.
• B2B financial firms on LinkedIn (fund administrators, commercial lenders, B2B fintech) should expect more than the $202 all-industry LinkedIn figure. The 11 financial services advertisers in Metadata’s data paid $417, with CPCs of $11.82 against $9.39 overall. Eleven advertisers is a small cut, so treat it as directional.
• Wealth managers and RIAs should plan on cost per client, because that is the only figure built from advisors’ own books. Kitces found it rises with practice size, from $815 for practices under $250,000 of revenue to $4,896 at $1 million to $2 million and $15,788 above $5 million, because senior advisor time gets more expensive. Kitces counts that time as a cost, so the figure is higher than cash spend. The rest of the study is summarized in our financial advisor marketing statistics.

First Page Sage’s funnel data for financial services gives a sense of how many broad leads one client takes: 29% of leads become MQLs (lead to MQL), 13% of MQLs become sales meetings (MQL to SQL) and 16% of those close (SQL to closed won). Multiplied, that is about 0.6%, or roughly 166 leads per client. Do not multiply that by the $662 CPL: the stage reports count anyone who leaves contact details as a lead, while the CPL report counts only direct connections.

What your cost per lead should be: the break-even calculator

A benchmark tells you what others pay. Your ceiling comes from three of your own numbers: gross profit per new customer, the share of leads that become customers, and how much of that profit you are willing to spend to win it. The formula:

Max cost per lead = gross profit per new customer x lead-to-customer rate x acquisition share

I use one third as the default acquisition share, which is a rule of thumb, not a published benchmark; set your own. Build it in a blank Google Sheet or Excel file, labels in column A, values in column B, rates as decimals:

Row B11 is the useful one. It turns any benchmark into a question your CRM can answer: do we close at least this share of leads from this channel?

Three worked examples

Revenue, margin and conversion inputs marked illustrative are made up to show the math. The benchmark CPLs are the sourced figures above.

The law firm row matches the conclusion in our how many leads do I need calculator, which runs the same firm backward from a revenue goal: at a 19% close rate, search leads at $131.63 eat about 43% of the revenue target. The lever is the close rate, not the bid.

The same formula as a lookup table, at a one-third acquisition share:

Find your row, then compare the cell with the benchmark for your channel. A $2,000-profit customer bought with $202 LinkedIn leads needs 30% of leads to close. A $50,000-profit customer can carry a $658 LinkedIn lead, worst-quarter territory, at a 5% close rate. If you want a second pair of eyes on the inputs, you can book a consultation.

Levers that move cost per lead, with the measured gap

Each lever below comes with the size of the difference in a named dataset, so you can rank them by what they are worth.

Before you compare any of these with your own account, check that your conversion counts only real leads. A platform that counts view-through conversions or page views will flatter your rate; how LinkedIn, Google and Facebook each count a conversion is laid out in our conversion rate benchmarks.

Frequently asked questions

What is the average cost per lead on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn publishes no average cost per lead. The best measured benchmark is Metadata's 2026 B2B Paid Media Benchmark: $202 per lead on a spend-weighted basis across 138 B2B advertisers in 2025, and $376 for the median advertiser. The best quarter paid under $196 and the worst quarter more than $658. Lead Gen Forms averaged $193 per lead, against $346 for landing pages.

What is the average cost per lead across all industries?

It depends on the channel and the definition of a lead. Google and Microsoft search ads had a $66.69 median cost per lead across 23 industries in WordStream by LocaliQ's 2026 benchmarks. First Page Sage's blended B2B figures, which divide total marketing spend by direct sales conversations, run from $96 in eCommerce and HVAC to $970 in higher education.

What are cost per lead benchmarks for financial services?

Finance and insurance search ads had a $74.44 median cost per lead in LocaliQ's 2026 data. First Page Sage puts blended financial services CPL at $662, fintech at $473 and business insurance at $427. In Metadata's dataset, 11 financial services advertisers paid $297 per lead across paid channels and $417 on LinkedIn. Wealth managers have no sourced CPL; Kitces puts median cost per new client at $2,551.

How do LinkedIn ads cost per lead compare with Google Ads and Facebook?

Among B2B advertisers in Metadata's 2025 data, LinkedIn cost $202 per lead, Facebook $145, Instagram $138 and Google Ads $524. For mostly local and small advertisers, LocaliQ reports $66.69 for search and $27.39 for Facebook lead campaigns. The buyer type and lead definition change the number more than the platform does.

What is a good cost per lead?

A good cost per lead is below your break-even: gross profit per new customer times the share of leads that become customers, times the share of profit you will spend to win one. With $18,000 of gross profit, a 5% lead-to-customer rate and a one-third share, the ceiling is $300 per lead. Compare that ceiling with the benchmark for your channel.

What is the minimum budget for LinkedIn lead generation ads?

LinkedIn's minimum daily budget is $10 for any ad format, the minimum lifetime budget for a new campaign is $100, and LinkedIn suggests $25 a day for new advertisers paying in USD. At a $9.39 CPC and a 5.9% click-to-lead rate, $10 a day buys about two leads a month, too few to compare ads.

How do you calculate cost per lead?

Divide the spend for a period by the leads it produced in that period. To match a benchmark, use its definitions: LocaliQ counts ad spend and any tracked conversion, Metadata counts spend on lead-generation campaigns, and First Page Sage counts total marketing spend per direct sales connection. Calculate per channel, and count only leads that meet your written definition.