Where roofing work actually comes from, and what each source costs

Ask ten roofers where their work comes from and you'll get ten different answers, most of them ending in "word of mouth, mainly". That's usually true and it's rarely the whole picture — and it doesn't help when the phone goes quiet in February.

So here's the full map: every source of roofing work, how you actually pay for it, and what roofers report it costing.

The free ones

Repeat customers and word of mouth. Still the best work you'll get: they've already decided they trust you, they rarely price-shop, and they turn up pre-qualified. The catch is that you can't turn it up when you need it. It arrives at its own pace, and it lags — the referral you get in March came from a job you did in November.

Google Business Profile. Free to set up, and it's how most people now start looking for a roofer. Someone with a leak searches, gets the map results, and rings two or three from the listings. What decides whether you're one of them is mostly recent reviews and real photos of your own work. This costs time rather than money and builds slowly, which is exactly why it gets put off — and it's the single cheapest thing on this list that you actually control.

Facebook local groups. Community and village pages generate a real trickle of roofing recommendations. Free, unpredictable, and worth being visible in if you work a defined patch.

The ones you pay per enquiry

This is the category most people mean when they talk about buying leads. The mechanics differ more than the branding suggests — we've written a full four-way comparison of Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Rated People and Bark — but for roofing specifically, here's what's reported.

• MyBuilder. Free to join, and you pay only when a customer shortlists you and swaps contact details. Roofing enquiries are tracked at roughly £15–£60 a lead, the higher end on bigger jobs.
• Rated People. A subscription plus per-lead fees, with roofing reported around £12–£50 a lead.
• Bark. Credits, at around £1.80 a credit, with the credit cost of an enquiry shown before you commit. Credits expire, so buying in bulk against a quiet month has a cost of its own.
• Checkatrade. Not per-lead: a 12-month membership, with the cheapest listing at £30 + VAT a month and lead-generating plans quoted per trade and postcode. Members report £100–£500+ a month. We've covered what Checkatrade actually costs in detail.

Treat all of those as reported figures rather than a price list. They come from third-party trackers and member reports; your own quote depends on your postcodes and the volume you ask for.

Pay-per-lead sellers. Separate from the directories, there are companies that sell roofing enquiries directly, sometimes marketed as exclusive rather than shared. Exclusivity is worth paying something for — but it's worth checking what it means in the contract, how the enquiry was generated, and whether "exclusive" means one roofer or one roofer per week. The same cost-per-won-job test applies either way.

Google Ads. You pay per click, not per enquiry, and roofing terms are competitive because the job values are high. It can work well for emergency-repair searches, where intent is immediate. It punishes you hard if the clicks land on a weak page or nobody answers the phone.

The ones that come through other people

Builders, scaffolders, letting agents, estate agents and loss adjusters all meet roofs that need work and mostly don't do roofs. These referrals cost nothing but a relationship, convert far better than anything you buy, and are the most neglected source on this list. Being the roofer who turns up when a builder rings is worth more than any subscription — and it compounds, because the builder has a next job.

Insurance and storm work sits here too. It arrives in bursts after bad weather, it's often urgent, and it comes with paperwork most jobs don't have.

The maths that decides all of it

Here's the thing that makes roofing different from most trades: the job-value spread is enormous.

At one end, replacing a few slipped tiles or resealing flashing is £150–£600. At the other, a full re-roof on a 3-bed semi runs from around £6,500 in concrete tile to £18,500 in natural slate, depending on the guide you read and the material. Price guides don't even agree on the average, which tells you how wide the middle is.

Now put a lead fee against that. Say enquiries cost you £40 and you win one in five:

• On a £9,000 re-roof, that won job carried £200 of lead cost. Against the margin on nine grand, it's nothing. You'd buy that lead all day.
• On a £250 repair, that same won job carried the same £200. You've turned a £250 job into a £50 job before you've climbed the ladder.

Same platform, same fee, same win rate — opposite verdicts. Which means the question "are roofing leads worth it?" has no answer in the abstract. The only version worth asking is: what does a won job cost me, by job type, from this source?

Two things follow.

Know what a source actually sends you. A platform sending mostly small repairs is a different product from one sending re-roofs, whatever the fee. You can only tell by counting for a few months.

Your win rate moves the answer more than the fee does. Going from winning one enquiry in five to two in five halves your cost per job. That's a bigger swing than any discount you'll negotiate, and on shared platforms most of it comes down to who replied first with something useful.

The bit that costs nothing and gets skipped

Whatever mix you land on, you need to be able to answer two questions at renewal time: how many enquiries did this send me last month, and how many became paid work?

Most roofers can't, and it's not carelessness. Enquiries land in four places — an app notification, a text, an email, a missed call from a number you don't recognise — and by the evening they've merged into a general sense of being busy. That's how a subscription that stopped earning its money gets renewed three times.

A notebook column is enough to fix it. So is anything that puts every enquiry in one list with a source against it. That's what grafter.ly does with the ones that arrive by email: forward it in and it becomes a job alongside the rest of your work, ready to quote from your phone before you've packed the van. The enquiry you paid for is worth most in the first hour, and least on Thursday evening when you finally get to it.

Paid leads are a marketing spend like any other. Measured against your own numbers, some of them will be the cheapest work you buy all year, and some will quietly cost you more than they bring in. You only find out which by counting.

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Sources. Per-lead figures for MyBuilder, Rated People and Bark are from the Local Adder trade lead cost tracker (last verified 22 July 2026) — reported figures rather than published tariffs. Checkatrade's published pricing is from its own guide and join page, checked 20 August 2026. Roofing job values are from published UK price guides including MyJobQuote and Checkatrade's roof replacement guide; guides differ on the average, so the ranges above are deliberately wide. All checked 23 August 2026 — platform pricing changes, so get a current quote before you budget.