Google Local Services Ads (LSA): Costs, Eligibility, and How They Compare

How Google Local Services Ads actually work

Google Local Services Ads sit at the very top of a search results page: above standard Google Search Ads, above the Map Pack, above organic listings. A homeowner searching "AC repair near me" sees LSA cards before anything else, each stamped with a green checkmark and one of two trust badges: Google Guaranteed for home-services trades, or Google Screened for professional services.

The pricing model is the headline difference from Google Search Ads. LSA is pay-per-lead: Google's help center states that 'you're charged for each valid lead you receive through your Local Services ad', meaning a call, message, or booking rather than a click. Google also states that 'lead prices may vary depending on your location, the job type, the type of lead, or your bidding mode', and that 'message leads are typically priced lower than the corresponding phone lead price'.

The Google Guaranteed badge is more than UI. If a homeowner is dissatisfied with covered work, Google will reimburse the invoice up to a published cap, which is what makes the trust signal genuinely stronger than a normal ad label. There is real money behind it.

• Google Guaranteed covers home-services trades (HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, garage door, pest control, locksmiths, cleaners, tree services). Reimbursement-backed.
• Google Screened covers professional services (lawyers, financial planners, real-estate agents, therapists). Background-check-backed but no reimbursement.
• Pay-per-lead: charged on call, message, or booking, not on click. Google sets the lead price and does not publish it.

What an LSA lead costs, and why we show no number

This page used to carry a table of LSA cost-per-lead figures by trade. We deleted it. Every one of those numbers traced to a marketing agency's monthly tracker rather than to Google, and none of them stated a method we could check.

Here is the whole of what Google publishes about LSA pricing, verbatim from its Local Services Ads help center: "You're charged for each valid lead you receive through your Local Services ad." And: "Lead prices may vary depending on your location, the job type, the type of lead, or your bidding mode." That is it. There is no per-vertical price, no per-market price, and no published average anywhere in Google's documentation. Anyone quoting you a per-lead dollar range for LSA is quoting an agency, not Google.

What Google does document is the credit mechanism. Leads Google judges invalid or low quality are not charged, and charged leads can be credited afterwards. The catch worth planning for is on the invoice: the original charge stays on it and the credit posts separately, so reconciliation is noisier than a simple refund would be.

Google Search Ads, by contrast, do have a methodology-stated public benchmark. LocalIQ's home-services study, covering April 2024 to March 2025, puts the median home-services search lead at $90.92 at a $7.85 median cost per click, with per-trade medians running from $93.69 for electricians to $228.15 for roofing and gutters. Those are the Search Ads figures this site uses. They are not LSA figures and we never present them as such.

Google LSA cost per lead

Not published

Google states prices vary by location, job type, lead type and bidding mode

Google Local Services Ads Help

Google Search Ads, home services cost per lead

$90.92

Median across US home-services campaigns, Apr 2024 to Mar 2025; CPC $7.85

LocalIQ Home Services Search Advertising Benchmarks

Manual max cost-per-lead bidding

Being retired

LSA migrates into Performance Max with pay-per-lead goals from August 2026

Google Local Services Ads Help

The August 2026 migration into Performance Max

This is the most consequential change to the product in years and it lands in the middle of 2026, so any LSA plan written before it needs revisiting.

Google is migrating Local Services Ads into Performance Max with pay-per-lead goals, starting August 2026 for US home-service and storefront-service businesses. Advertisers still pay only for valid leads, so the headline economics of the model are unchanged.

What does change is control. Manual maximum cost-per-lead bidding is no longer supported. Operators who have been holding a hard ceiling on what they will pay for a lead lose that lever and hand the bid decision to Google's automation, in a channel where Google already sets the price and publishes none of it. If your LSA account depends on a manual max CPL to stay profitable, that is the thing to plan around this year.

The practical read for a local operator: the trust badge, the placement, and the pay-only-for-valid-leads promise all survive the migration. The ability to cap your own unit price does not.

Eligibility: what LSA actually requires before you can run

LSA is gate-kept. You do not sign up and launch the same day. Google's screening covers the business and the people inside it, and the gate is the reason the badge means something.

Per Google's official Local Services help documentation, screening can include any of: business registration, license verification, public or general liability or professional indemnity insurance, and third-party background checks. Background checks are run by Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations and re-run annually.

Failure consequences are real. A failed first application requires a 30-day wait to reapply; a second failure pushes that to 180 days. Eligibility is a common reason home-service operators planning to "just turn on LSA" do not actually start running for weeks. (See Google's US business screening requirements.)

1. Business license verification: Google validates state, provincial, or country-level professional licenses against state and country databases.
2. Insurance documentation: public or general liability or professional indemnity certificate showing coverage amount, business name, address. Employer liability insurance is not accepted.
3. Owner background check: identity validity, criminal history, cross-checks against national sex offender and sanctions registries.
4. Field-worker background checks: every employee servicing customers must individually clear screening before LSA-sourced jobs route to them.
5. Company-level screening: civil litigation history, judgments, and liens from federal and state courts.
6. Annual re-verification: checks repeat after one year of approval. Failed re-checks pull the badge.

Where Google LSA wins

LSA's strengths are real and not vendor spin. For service trades with high-intent same-day searches, it is one of the strongest placements available to a local business.

• Top-of-page placement: LSA cards render above Google Search Ads, above the Map Pack, above organic. For mobile searches in particular, LSA owns the first screen.
• Genuine trust signal: the Google Guaranteed reimbursement is real money backing a badge, not a UI sticker. Homeowners recognise it.
• High-intent searches: queries like "AC repair near me" and "plumber open now" are bottom-funnel. LSA captures them before the click ever happens, and pay-per-lead means you do not pay for someone who clicked and bounced.
• You are not charged for invalid leads: Google states it does not charge for leads it judges invalid or low quality, and charged leads can be credited afterwards. Plan for the credit to appear as a separate line rather than as a reversal.
• Minimal management overhead: no keyword research, no ad-copy testing, no Quality Score tuning. Google automates targeting and creative, and after the Performance Max migration it automates more of it.

Where Google LSA doesn't win

The same things that make LSA simple are the things that cap it. The constraints are structural, not setup mistakes.

• No published price. Google sets the lead price and publishes nothing about it, at any level of granularity. You cannot benchmark your account against anything, you cannot forecast a market entry, and after August 2026 you cannot cap your own maximum cost per lead either. That is an unusual amount of pricing opacity to accept in a channel you are meant to budget for.
• Capped reach. The LSA unit shows a small number of cards. Once those slots are saturated in your market, more budget does not mean more leads; Google rebalances and the per-lead price moves instead.
• No creative control. You do not write the headline, pick the photo, or test the offer. Your differentiation is your review score and your responsiveness. An operator who wins on a unique angle (financing, same-day, lifetime warranty) cannot surface it in the LSA card.
• Manual dispute is gone. Google replaced the manual lead-dispute interface with an automated credit system. Advertisers can flag a lead through the lead-rating tool but cannot themselves overturn a charge, and the system's reasoning is not exposed.
• The original charge stays on the invoice. Even when a credit is granted, the original lead charge remains and the credit posts separately to your account balance.
• Doesn't fit considered-purchase trades. Remodelers, builders, and high-ticket installers run multi-week or multi-month consideration cycles. LSA's same-day intent model rarely fills those pipelines on its own.
• Eligibility gate. Background checks, insurance documents, license verification: weeks of friction before a single lead, and any failure pushes you 30 to 180 days out.

How CPVD complements LSA (instead of replacing it)

LSA and Cost Per Verified Delivery are not substitutes. They sit at different points in the funnel and the right answer for most operators is to run both.

LSA captures the homeowner who already knows they have a problem and is searching for a solution today. That is high-intent, low-volume traffic at a price Google sets and does not publish. CPVD reaches the homeowner who has not yet started searching: the daily commuter passing through the tunnel that is yours, at from $0.25 per GPS-verified delivery to a real person's phone while they are driving. Same buyer, different moment.

A delivery is not a lead, and this site never treats the two as one unit. What layering does is change which auction you meet the buyer in: corridor exposure ahead of the failure means the homeowner is more likely to search your name rather than the generic "AC repair near me" query where Google sets the price.

For the architectural difference between auction-priced lead generation and operator-owned verified delivery, see What is the Middleman Tax? and What is Cost Per Verified Delivery?

Comparison: Google LSA vs Google Search Ads vs CPVD

Three channels, three different things you are actually paying for. The right read is which signal you want priced: a click, a lead, or a verified delivery to a real person's phone while they are driving.