A click on "emergency plumber london" costs £39.84 on average on Google Ads, "new boiler quote" £30.39, "boiler replacement" £20.73 and "boiler service london" £13.15, with top-of-page bids reaching £32.57. A click on "air conditioning installation" costs £3.17, and "air conditioning quote" £3.81. What separates the two groups is the value of the job and how fast the searcher needs someone.
For an installer, the cost of a quote request is set by the town, the urgency and the size of the job, not by the trade: emergencies and new boilers are paid for at £20 to £40 a click, while air conditioning can be bought at £3 to £4 a click if the page is live before the season.
Below are real cost-per-click figures on Google UK, how Local Services Ads work for plumbers and heating engineers, how much grant searches weigh and what a contact form should ask. For the organic side, brand pages and reviews, see our guide to SEO for plumbers and heating engineers.
An emergency click costs ten times an air con click
The table lines up the searches that bring enquiries to a plumbing and heating firm, with the average cost per click and the high top-of-page bid, in other words what the most aggressive advertisers are paying.
| Keyword | Average searches/month | Average CPC | High bid |
|---|---|---|---|
| emergency plumber london | 1,600 | £39.84 | £73.92 |
| new boiler quote | 720 | £30.39 | £32.58 |
| emergency plumber | 12,100 | £21.52 | £37.19 |
| boiler repair london | 880 | £20.74 | £36.36 |
| boiler replacement | 5,400 | £20.73 | £25.78 |
| heat pump quote | 480 | £20.57 | £23.23 |
| boiler service london | 1,300 | £13.15 | £32.57 |
| boiler service manchester | 480 | £10.03 | £19.54 |
| plumber london | 5,400 | £9.68 | £43.90 |
| boiler repair birmingham | 480 | £8.63 | £11.67 |
| plumber leeds | 2,900 | £7.38 | £26.09 |
| air conditioning installation london | 1,300 | £3.90 | £7.76 |
| air conditioning quote | 720 | £3.81 | £5.73 |
| plumber manchester | 4,400 | £2.99 | £14.38 |
Two things stand out. The first is the gap between cities: "plumber london" costs £9.68 a click, "plumber manchester" £2.99, with similar volumes and the same kind of need. An installer outside London has no reason to pay London prices: bids should be set on the CPCs for your own area. The second is the gap between urgency and size of job on one side and planned, smaller work on the other: someone asking for an air conditioning quote costs £3.81 a click, someone with water through the ceiling in London costs ten times that. A new boiler sits with the emergencies, at £30.39 for "new boiler quote", because the job is worth thousands of pounds and national boiler installers bid on it too.
To estimate what an enquiry costs, one division is enough. With a hypothetical 10% conversion rate from page to form or phone call, a £10.03 click on "boiler service manchester" brings in an enquiry at about £100; a £3.81 click on "air conditioning quote" brings one in at about £38. The margin on a boiler service, which the installers on page one for "boiler service cost" price at £70 to £130, can't carry the first figure; an installation can carry the second. The full calculation, with the margin by type of job, is in our guide to cost per click; we ran the same numbers for the neighbouring renovation trade in Google Ads for construction companies.
Before buying a click, look at who's in the map
On 10 October 2026 we read the first page for "boiler repair birmingham" on a smartphone, with the location set to Birmingham. It's a search with 480 searches a month worth £8.63 a click. The local pack had three listings with 558, 118 and 34 reviews, and the second one links to an Instagram profile instead of a website.
That means the map in that results page, which costs nothing per click, is still within reach: a profile with a few dozen genuine reviews, the right category and up-to-date opening hours stands a good chance of getting in. Paying £8.63 a click to sit above a map you could occupy with your Business Profile is a choice, not an obligation. In Manchester, for "boiler service", the weakest listing in the local pack had 85 reviews and the strongest 1,600: there, advertising helps more, at least while your reviews grow.
On the same Birmingham results page, three of the nine organic snippets contain a phone number. People looking for a boiler repair want to ring someone, and a landing page that opens a six-field form instead of a call button loses exactly those people.
Local Services Ads charge for the enquiry, not the click
Local Services Ads are available in the UK for the "Plumbers" and "HVAC (heating or air conditioning)" categories. They appear at the top of the search with the "Google Verified" badge and, according to Google's UK support page, you "pay only for leads related to your business and the services that you offer". Not for the click.
To get in, Google asks UK businesses for proof of registration (a VAT number or a Companies House registration number) and, for some advertisers, a public liability insurance document showing the amount of cover. Availability depends on the area and is checked from the same page. The advantage for an installer is predictability: you pay for a contact, not for a visit to a page. The limit is that verification takes paperwork and time, and coverage changes from area to area.
What Local Services Ads are, in ninety seconds: the official Google Small Business video. It's a few years old, from before the badges were merged into "Google Verified", but the mechanism is the same.
To see how the Local Services Ads box differs from the organic local results, read our analysis of the local pack.
Grants are a search before they're a discount
"Heat pump grant" is searched 5,400 times a month on average, with peaks of 6,600 in November 2025 and January 2026. "Boiler upgrade scheme" averages 4,400 and reaches 6,600 in the same months, "air source heat pump grant" 2,900 with 4,400 in September 2025, and "warm homes plan" jumped from 4,400 searches in December 2025 to 49,500 in January 2026. In the UK these clicks aren't cheap: between £4.49 for "warm homes plan" and £9.63 for "air source heat pump grant". They still cost less than half of a click on "heat pump quote" (£20.57).
Anyone searching for a grant is already thinking about replacing their heating. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme, open in England and Wales, gives £7,500 towards an air source or ground source heat pump, £5,000 towards a biomass boiler and £2,500 towards an air-to-air heat pump, with an extra £1,500 until March 2027 for properties heated by oil or LPG with no mains gas. According to Ofgem, which runs the scheme, it's the installer who applies for and redeems the voucher on the owner's behalf, and the installer must be MCS certified.
For a heat pump installer, the move is a page that explains how the grant works in the typical case for your customers, with an example job and an offer to handle the voucher, ending with the quote form. It's research traffic that costs £5 to £10 a click in ads, or nothing in organic search, and it arrives months before the real enquiry. The rules change often: the page needs updating every time the scheme changes, with the date shown clearly and a link to the official source.
The form decides how many quotes turn into site visits
A generic form (name, email, message) brings in enquiries the engineer has to call back just to understand what they're about. One designed for heating installers does that work up front:
- type of job as a single choice: boiler replacement, new air conditioning, heat pump, service, breakdown;
- make and age of the current system, with the option to attach a photo of the data plate;
- postcode, to filter out enquiries outside your area straight away;
- interest in the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, yes or no, so you know whether there's a voucher to handle;
- best time to call back.
For breakdowns the form isn't needed: you need a call button, at the top and visible on a phone. Splitting the two routes, a call for emergencies and a form for planned work, also lets you measure what each kind of enquiry costs, which a single "generic" contact makes impossible. We explain how to track a call from an ad and from a profile on our lead generation service page.
Recommended reading: how to do keyword research to find the service searches in your area.
Frequently asked questions
It depends heavily on the city and the job. In October 2026 the average CPC for "plumber london" was £9.68, "plumber leeds" £7.38 and "plumber manchester" £2.99, while "emergency plumber london" reached £39.84.
Yes, in the "Plumbers" and "HVAC (heating or air conditioning)" categories. You pay per lead and have to pass Google's verification, with proof of business registration and, for some advertisers, public liability insurance; availability needs checking area by area.
With an average click of £3.81 on "air conditioning quote" and a hypothetical 10% conversion rate, an enquiry costs about £38. The real figure depends on the page and the form.
Yes, if you're an MCS-certified heat pump installer. "Boiler upgrade scheme" gets 4,400 searches a month on average and a click costs £7.34, less than half of "heat pump quote"; the page needs updating in line with Ofgem's rules, with the £7,500 grant for air source and ground source heat pumps.
In April, before the peak. "Air conditioning installation" goes from 5,400 searches in April to 22,200 in May and 60,500 in June, and campaigns and pages need a few days to settle in.
Where to start
On your phone, search "boiler repair" and "air conditioning installation" followed by the name of your town and count the reviews of the listings in the map. If the weakest has fewer than twenty, your first spend isn't advertising: it's asking every customer for a review over the next two months. If they all have more than a hundred, you need advertising to stay visible in the meantime, ideally Local Services Ads, which you pay for per enquiry.
To set up campaigns with the cost per click in your area, see our Google Ads service or get in touch.
