How much do mortgage leads cost in the UK?

The three pricing models (and the one trap brokers fall into)

UK mortgage leads are sold in three ways, and the difference between the last two catches out a lot of brokers.

• Per-lead. A fixed price per contact record. You get a name, phone, email and whatever qualifier data the provider captured. No appointment. You chase. Bark, Unbiased, Digital Roo and RMT Direct all sit here.
• Per-appointment. A price per booked call. An appointment exists in a calendar, but showing up isn't guaranteed. Across the mortgage industry, expect roughly a 70% show rate on pay-per-appointment products. If your provider charges £100 per appointment and 30% no-show, your real cost per call is £143.
• Per-show. You only pay when the applicant actually turns up. No-shows refund automatically. MortgagesBooked sits here.

Each model puts the risk in a different place. Per-lead hands all of it to you: you pay whether the applicant answers the phone or not. Per-appointment splits it. You pay for the booking, but you absorb the no-show risk. Per-show moves the risk onto the provider, who has to generate leads that actually show up.

That last distinction is the one I see brokers miss most often. Some providers market "pay-per-appointment" as if it were "pay-per-show". They're not the same product, and the maths works out very differently.

How brokers actually track lead value: lead → contact → fact find

When I'm evaluating any lead source at Bluewave Mortgages, I track the same three-stage pipeline:

• Lead. A record you've paid for or received. Cost is known.
• Contact. You've actually got them on the phone. For cold-form leads, the contact rate ranges from about 15% (shared Bark leads) up to 40–50% (exclusive qualified leads).
• Fact find. They've sat through your intake and you have enough to shop the case. Typically 30–70% of contacts convert to fact find, depending on lead quality and how warm they are.

The important number isn't "cost per lead". It's cost per fact find, because that's the point at which the case actually has commercial value. That's how I compare providers, and it's how the maths below is set up.

What UK brands actually charge (with sources)

A lot of mortgage lead-gen companies hide their pricing behind a "Contact us" form. The ones below publish £ figures on their own websites. Everything quoted here is linked to the source page. If a price is behind a login or vague framing, we've said so rather than guessed.

I've actually bought from Bark, Unbiased and Digital Roo. I enquired about pricing at VouchedFor and RMT Direct before building my own flow, and I've got broker friends currently running VouchedFor subscriptions. I visited every provider's website to cross-check published figures against what I pay in practice. Where you see "published" numbers, those come from their own pricing pages. Where you see "effective" or "in practice", that's me as the broker. Figures current as of April 2026.

A few brands that come up repeatedly in search results don't publish prices at all. Lead Genie has a "Book A Free Consultation" button with no figures. Moneyfacts doesn't list adviser lead pricing publicly. If a provider won't quote you a number before you're on the phone, assume they're price-testing against you.

Cost by lead type

Mortgage lead pricing varies by vertical. The shape of demand, lender complexity, and per-case broker fees all push the economics around.

• Residential first-time buyer. Highest volume, most competitive ad market, lowest per-lead prices. Typical £10–£40 per lead on pay-per-lead platforms. See lead quality for what a pre-qualified residential lead should actually contain.
• Remortgage. Similar volume to FTB but with the rate-end-date urgency signal, which commands a small premium. Rate-only remortgage leads tend to price in the same band; extra-borrow leads can cost more because the loan (and therefore the broker fee) is larger. Remortgage-specific page here.
• Buy-to-let. Narrower market, fewer providers, higher per-lead cost. Expect £30 and up per pay-per-lead, especially for limited-company BTL or portfolio cases. Broker fees per completed case are higher too, which offsets the price. BTL leads page.
• Equity release. Lowest volume, age-gated audience, specialist lender panel. Providers that gate on explicit interest (rather than age alone) see lower volume but dramatically better conversion. Equity release page.

The effective-cost calculation

Sticker price is the wrong number to optimise against. What matters is effective cost per contact (someone who picks up) and ultimately cost per fact find. The formula I use:

Effective cost = price per lead ÷ contact rate

Worked examples with the figures from the table above:

• Bark at £14 per lead, shared 5 ways. When four other brokers hit the phones the second the record goes out, contact rate drops hard. At 15% contact rate: £14 ÷ 0.15 = ~£93 per contact. Take that to fact find and you're often past £200 per qualified case.
• Unbiased at ~£85 per lead (real cost, £643/mo ÷ 7.5 leads). Leads are exclusive but cold-form. At a 40% contact rate: £85 ÷ 0.40 = ~£213 per contact. The "from £10" line on the Unbiased pricing page doesn't describe what you actually pay per completed call.
• Digital Roo at £40 per exclusive lead, 50% contact rate: £40 ÷ 0.50 = £80 per contact. Lowest floor of the per-lead options on exclusivity, but you're locked into the 50-lead minimum batch.
• Generic pay-per-appointment at £100, 70% show rate: £100 ÷ 0.70 = £143 per actual call. This is the trap I mentioned. The appointment is booked, but roughly 3 in 10 don't show, and you've paid anyway.
• MortgagesBooked at £90 per show. No-shows refund, so the model forces 100% show rate on the bill. £90 per call. No chase time. No credit wasted on ghosts.

When I lay this out for brokers who tell me my £90 is expensive, the gap usually closes within a minute. "From £10" on Bark costs more per actual conversation than my £90 per show. Unbiased works out at twice my price per contact before you even start on fact-find conversion. The only model that beats per-show on price-per-contact is exclusive pay-per-lead at batch volume, and that's a different risk profile (batch commitment, chase time, no-show on the calendar).

Hidden costs most brokers miss

The published price is rarely the total cost. When you compare providers, build these in:

• Postcode access fees. Unbiased charges £96 + VAT per month per postcode area on top of the per-lead cost, before you've bought a single enquiry. Cover three areas and you've added £288+VAT/month to the bill before the first lead lands.
• Account funding minimums. Unbiased also requires £440 + VAT/month of account funding regardless of whether you use it. That's a floor, not a cap.
• Multi-month agreements. The Unbiased commitment runs 6 months. A £96+VAT postcode access subscription is really a £576+VAT decision.
• Shared-lead dilution. Bark leads are shared with up to five brokers. Your conversion rate against four others dialling the same applicant within minutes is not the same as against zero.
• Presence-only subscriptions. VouchedFor's £60+VAT/month gets you a listing, not leads. If no client finds you that month, you still paid £60.
• Chase time. Per-lead products don't include calendar bookings. Three or four call attempts plus a text and an email per lead is typical. At £50/hour of your time, that's £4–£6 of hidden cost per lead before you speak to anyone.
• VAT. Almost every UK mortgage lead price is quoted ex-VAT. A £10 lead is £12. A £643 commitment is £772. Consistent, but easy to miss in a side-by-side.

What mortgage leads should not cost

Price is one signal. Some things should give you pause regardless of the number.

• Anything over £150 per lead without a clear quality rationale. High-value verticals like commercial lending can justify that. Residential mortgage leads rarely do.
• "Exclusive" without a defined window or resale policy. Ask for it in writing.
• Subscription minimums with no floor on lead volume. Paying £500/month with a promise of "up to X leads" means the provider is incentivised to send you the cheapest leads they can, not the best.
• Prices quoted without VAT disclosure. Assume the worst and add 20%.
• No refund mechanism for no-shows, invalid contact details, or duplicates. If the provider doesn't stand behind quality, they're not confident in it.

I built MortgagesBooked on the opposite model because, as a broker myself, I was tired of paying for leads that never answered and appointments that never showed. Pay per calendar-booked show, credit refunds automatically if they don't turn up, no contracts, no minimums. It's one answer to the cost question, not the only one. The right model depends on your chase capacity, your current show rate, and whether you want the risk of ghosts to sit with you or with the provider generating the leads.

If you want to see what live appointments actually look like in the portal before paying anything, the free preview shows current-week flow.

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