Best equity release lead providers UK, ranked (2026)

Quick picks (pick one and skip the rest)

• Booked appointments that show up, no chase: MortgagesBooked (£110/show, no-show refunds automatic).
• Cheapest published cost-per-lead: RMT Direct (£90/lead, no VAT). Note their site states they're licensed in Gibraltar, not FCA-authorised.
• Clearest refund policy on paper: LeadCrowd (from £110/lead, 7-day refund window with written rules) or Digital Roo (replaces wrong numbers, hoaxes and duplicates).
• Best published screening criteria: MCB Digital Solutions (55+, minimum property value, LTV checks, all in writing, and FCA-authorised as a firm).
• Appointment-style calls with hard qualification claims: Smarter Clicks (over-60 ad rule, LTV filters, claims 90% contact rate; no price published).
• Skip if you want to know the price before a sales call: LeadJet, Financial Marketing, Lead River, Lead Genie, Lending Expert. None of them publish a number.
• Different animal: Adbetter is a marketing agency that runs your own ER campaigns for a fee, not a lead seller. Compare it with hiring an agency, not with this list.

The comparison table

Everything below is from each provider's own website, checked on 22 July 2026. "—" means not published. If a cell surprises you, click through and check, providers change terms without telling anyone.

The rankings, 1 to 12

Ranked on what each provider is willing to put in writing: price, exclusivity, screening, refund terms, and what you're actually paying for. The full criteria are at the bottom. Screenshots are each provider's own equity release page, captured 22 July 2026. Ours is the marketplace itself: four real equity release appointments, as brokers saw them.

1. MortgagesBooked: best for showed appointments (that's me)

Four real equity release appointments from our marketplace (all since claimed). Names, emails and phone numbers stay hidden until a broker claims, which is why the cards carry everything except contact details.

• Model: Pay-per-show. You claim a booked calendar appointment, not a phone list.
• Price: £110 per appointment that shows up. Work it per appointment and this is the cheapest option here: a £90 lead at an optimistic 50% lead-to-booked-appointment rate costs £180 per appointment, before you count the dialling hours it took to book it.
• Refunds: The clearest policy on this page. No show = no pay. The credit refunds automatically.
• Leads: Exclusive, one broker per appointment. Contact details stay hidden until you claim.
• Screening: Published in full: 55+ hard floor in the qualifier, residential main residence only, an explicit yes to releasing equity, property value, balance and postcode on the card before you claim.
• Where the interest comes from: Different funnel from the calculator ads most providers here run. Applicants arrive through our standard mortgage and remortgage funnels, and anyone 55-plus on a residential property is asked directly whether they'd be open to a discussion about equity release or a lifetime mortgage. Only a yes is marked as an equity release lead.
• Commitment: No contract, no monthly fee. Credits, spent when you claim.
• Evidence: Austin Durant claimed five appointments, completed two cases with a third in the pipeline, roughly £11k in commission at about 60% conversion. His case study, in his own words.
• Best for: Advisers who want the hour spent advising, not dialling. Full detail on the equity release leads page.

2. LeadCrowd: best cost-per-lead paperwork

• Model: Per-lead bidding marketplace. Fixed price or sponsored (ad spend plus a fee).
• Price: From £110/lead ex VAT fixed, or roughly £80 ad spend + £30 fee sponsored. Volume discounts from 30 leads/month.
• Leads: Exclusive: "we don't sell them to multiple advisors".
• Screening: Contact fields only (name, phone, email, postcode guaranteed). No age, property value or LTV thresholds published.
• Refunds: Best-documented CPL policy: 7-day window for wrong numbers, hoaxes and duplicates; refund rate reportedly under 7%.
• Commitment: No minimum order or contract stated.
• Watch for: The qualifying is on you. At 50% lead-to-appointment, £110/lead is £220 per booked conversation plus your dialling time.

3. RMT Direct: cheapest published price, read the licence line

• Model: Per-lead, generated from Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising. Weekly in-arrears billing.
• Price: £90/lead, no VAT (billed from Gibraltar).
• Leads: No exclusivity statement on the site. Ask for it in writing.
• Screening: Homeowner aged 55+ definition only. No property value or LTV thresholds.
• Refunds: No written policy.
• Evidence: Unusually specific testimonials; one adviser reports converting around 27.5%.
• Watch for: Their own site states RMT Group Limited is not authorised or regulated by the FCA and operates under a Gibraltar licence. Not automatically a problem for marketing leads, but decide that consciously.

4. Smarter Clicks: appointment-style, boldest claims

• Model: Booked call-backs at a fixed cost per lead: the prospect is "expecting your call" at an appointed time.
• Price: Not published. "Fixed cost per lead (no VAT)" with no figure.
• Leads: No exclusivity claim on the site.
• Screening: Strongest CPL claims here: every ad opens with an over-60 question, LTV filters, multi-step forms, England only, no calculator leads.
• Refunds: No written policy.
• Evidence: Claims a 90% contact rate and up to 35% sales conversion. Their claims, not verified figures.
• Watch for: If the claims survive a phone call, this is the closest thing to an appointments model in the CPL pack. Get the numbers in writing.

5. Digital Roo: solid mechanics, batch minimums

• Model: Per-lead, ordered in batches. Real-time delivery by email, SMS, API or portal.
• Price: Not published for equity release.
• Leads: "100% exclusive to you – we don't sell the same lead twice."
• Screening: PIN-verified mobile numbers; forms qualify and disqualify, but no published thresholds.
• Refunds: Written replacement policy for wrong numbers, hoaxes and duplicates. Scrub rate under 5%, they say.
• Commitment: No contracts, but minimum batches of 50 leads and at least 3 leads per day. A commitment for a sole adviser testing the water.

6. MCB Digital Solutions: best screening on paper

• Model: Per-lead, delivered in real time via API.
• Price: Not published.
• Leads: Described as exclusive (section heading), no detailed guarantee.
• Screening: The only CPL provider publishing thresholds: 55+ (or custom age filters), minimum property values (their example: £70k+), non-standard construction filtered, LTV sufficiency checks.
• Refunds: No written policy.
• Watch for: The firm is FCA-authorised (FRN 836323), rare in this market, and talks fluently about vulnerable-customer compliance. No price and no refund terms is what keeps them out of the top three.

7. LeadJet: clean exclusivity, campaign lead time

• Model: Campaign programme (Google, Meta, email), not an off-the-shelf feed. Leads typically start a few weeks after launch.
• Price: Not published.
• Leads: The clearest exclusivity wording in the market: "Every equity release enquiry is assigned to a single adviser. No shared distribution and no competing callbacks."
• Screening: Enquiries validated before delivery; you set age range, property focus and geography. No published thresholds.
• Delivery: Instant, to email, CRM or webhook.
• Refunds: No written policy.

8. Financial Marketing: good wording, thin detail

• Model: Per-lead, real-time to email or CRM, graded by an account manager.
• Price: Not published.
• Leads: "100% Exclusive Leads - We never sell your leads to another company." Exactly the sentence you want to see.
• Screening: Over-55 targeting; property value used as a disqualifier but no threshold given.
• Refunds: No written policy.
• Watch for: No numbers anywhere: no price, no thresholds, no conversion data. A shortlist candidate you interrogate on the phone.

9. Lead River: strong guarantee, odd cadence

• Model: Per-lead in weekly batches: order Friday, delivered across the following week. Leads arrive pre-educated about equity release.
• Price: Not published (sent in an "information pack").
• Leads: No exclusivity claim anywhere on the site. For a 55-plus audience, that's the first question to ask.
• Refunds: The best money-back wording of the CPL pack: invalid leads are free, and "if you order 100 leads, you will receive 100 high quality viable leads" or a refund.
• Evidence: One adviser testimonial reports 2 clients signed from a batch of 10.

10. Lead Genie: one claim, little else

• Model: Per-lead, real-time delivery.
• Price: Not published.
• Leads: "100% exclusive" per the homepage.
• Screening / Refunds / Evidence: Nothing published on any of the three.
• Watch for: Not a red flag as such, just a blank form you'd have to fill in yourself before spending anything.

11. Lending Expert: panel access, not a price list

• Model: Comparison site passing its own equity release traffic to a panel of approved brokers.
• Price: Not published. You join the panel to find out.
• Leads: No exclusivity statement.
• Screening / Refunds: Nothing published.
• Watch for: Real-time delivery from their own pages is plausible quality, but every term is behind the door.

12. Adbetter: an agency, not a lead seller

• Model: Performance agency: they run equity release ad campaigns you fund, fee as a percentage of ad spend.
• Price: n/a. Compare with hiring an agency, not with a per-lead price.
• Evidence: A 5.3x return-on-ad-spend case study for a lifetime mortgage client.
• Best for: Firms with £2k+ a month of ad budget that want to own the pipeline.
• Watch for: Ranked last only because it doesn't belong on a per-lead list. If you want leads next week, look higher up this page.

Three ways to buy equity release leads (and the maths that separates them)

Every provider above fits one of three models, and the honest comparison is cost per conversation, not cost per record.

• Cost-per-lead. £90 to £110 buys a contact record, and then you still have to find the appointment inside it: dial fast, chase, rebook. Even at an optimistic 50% lead-to-booked-appointment rate, a £90 lead is £180 per appointment and a £110 lead is £220, before you price the hours of dialling (five or more touches per contact is normal with a 55-plus audience that screens calls). Works at volume with a disciplined phone operation.
• Booked appointments. £110 buys a conversation that's already in the diary, and with pay-per-show, one that happened. Cost per appointment equals the sticker price, no dialling hours, and a no-show costs nothing. On a per-appointment basis this is the cheapest way to buy an equity release conversation on this page.
• Agency campaigns. You fund the ads, the agency takes a fee, you own the pipeline. Cheapest per lead at scale, slowest to start, and all the risk (compliance included) sits with you.

I've written the longer version of this maths in the mortgage lead cost guide, and the general market (all lead types, 13 providers) is covered in the main comparison.

Red flags specific to equity release leads

• No exclusivity statement. Three of the twelve don't mention exclusivity anywhere. A 55-plus homeowner who fills in one form and gets four advisers calling is a complaint waiting to happen, in a product line the FCA already watches closely.
• Calculator leads. Someone who clicked "how much could I release?" out of curiosity is not an equity release enquiry. Ask every provider how they separate curiosity from intent. (Smarter Clicks and MortgagesBooked both gate on this explicitly; most don't say.)
• No screening thresholds in writing. "Qualified" means nothing without numbers. Under-55s and £60k terraces with 90% LTV outstanding can't proceed, and you'll pay for them anyway unless the refund policy says otherwise.
• Licensing you haven't read. One provider on this list states plainly it isn't FCA-authorised and bills from Gibraltar. Legal, disclosed, and something you should consciously decide you're fine with rather than discover later.
• Prices behind a sales call. Ten of twelve. It's the industry norm and it's still a tell: if the price were competitive, it would be on the page.

How I ranked these

I run Bluewave Mortgages and I built MortgagesBooked, so I have a horse in this race. To keep it useful anyway, the ranking only counts what each provider publishes on its own website, checked page by page on 22 July 2026. Five criteria, equally weighted: a visible price, exclusivity in writing, screening criteria in writing, a refund or replacement policy in writing, and whether you're buying a contact record or a conversation. Corrections welcome, the contact details are in the footer.

FAQ