How much do mortgage leads cost

No price appears on this page, and the omission is the answer rather than an evasion. Every figure published for a mortgage lead is one of two things: a seller's rate card, or an average drawn from that seller's own book of business. A rate card is an opening position and an average describes somebody else's mix of states, products and buyers. Neither is the price a reader will be quoted.

Why a published price per lead is never your price

A price for a lead is settled per contract, not per market. The same consumer can be sold to a single buyer or to several, in a state where few lenders are bidding or in one where many are, on a purchase enquiry or a refinance enquiry, and each of those arrangements carries a different number. A published figure fixes all of those variables at somebody else's settings and prints the result.

Which of those variables moves a price, and in which direction, is set out in what drives the price of a mortgage lead. This page is about the shape of the offer rather than the levers behind it.

The four billing models a quote can come from

Before a number carries meaning, establish which model produced it. Buyers are billed in four broadly different ways, and the four models are not interchangeable: they differ in what triggers the charge, in how much of the work sits on your side after payment, and in how long it takes to learn whether the money was well spent.

The auction row is the one most often invisible on an invoice, because the bidding happens between the form being submitted and the lead being routed. The mechanism has a name and is explained in ping post. The connected-call row changes what you are buying more than any other, since it is an answered call rather than a stored record, and it only pays off if somebody licensed is free to take it.

Source for the auction row only: FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection, "Follow the Lead" Workshop, Staff Perspective, September 2016, on the workshop held 30 October 2015, which describes an automated, instantaneous, auction-style process in which buyers supply the aggregator with filters and the prices they will pay, and leads move through the network in real time until a buyer accepts. Two limits on that citation: the report addresses payday and short-term lending rather than mortgage, and it states no price for a mortgage lead. ftc.gov

The number that outranks the price you pay at purchase

Cost per funded loan outranks cost per lead, because it is the only one of the two a business actually consumes. A purchase price stops moving the moment you pay it. The price of an outcome is decided months later, by how many of those leads reach a closing table, which is why a cheaper lead can produce a more expensive loan.

The division that converts one into the other, and the cost it hides, are worked through in cost per lead against cost per funded loan. Your own ratio is knowable from your own closings, and nobody else's average substitutes for it.

What to ask a seller so two quotes line up

Two quotes are comparable only once you know they are quoting the same thing, and a price on its own never tells you that. Six questions settle it, and every one of them has a factual answer a seller can give on a first call. A seller who will not answer them in writing has told you something useful about the quote.

1. How many buyers receive this same lead, and is that number a term of the contract or a description of current practice?
2. Does the price change by state and by loan product, and if it does, what is the price for the states I am licensed in and the products I write?
3. What event triggers the charge: delivery, an accepted bid, a connected call of a stated minimum length, or a month of access?
4. Which filters are included at that price, and which ones cost more? Narrow geography, a credit band or a property type are often priced separately.
5. Is there a minimum volume, a term commitment or a notice period, and what happens to a shortfall inside a billing period?
6. What is the process and the deadline when a lead arrives with a disconnected number, from a state I am not licensed in, or from a form I have not seen? Ask to see the form and the consent wording the consumer read, which is the question behind TCPA consent on a mortgage lead.

Answers to those six convert a bare figure into something you can hold against another bare figure. Without them, two quotes that look a long way apart may be the same offer, and two that look identical may be different products entirely.

Which sellers state a price on their own public pages at all, and what those pages say, is recorded vendor by vendor at our disclosed comparison section, every figure attributed to the page it was read from and dated. A seller's own number is not an independent one, which is why it sits there rather than in the answer above.

Source: none exists, and that is the finding rather than an omission. No regulator, federal dataset or independent study collects or publishes what a mortgage lead sells for, so there is nothing on this question a reader can open and check. Searched on 20 September 2026: the mortgage data the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau publishes under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records loan and applicant attributes at 12 CFR 1003.4 and nothing about the marketing cost behind an application; the Federal Trade Commission's "Follow the Lead" workshop staff perspective of September 2016 describes the real-time auction by which leads are sold but prints no mortgage lead price, and the single per-lead figure it does carry belongs to an education-lead enforcement action rather than to a market; and the Mortgage Bankers Association's quarterly performance report measures loan production expense per originated loan, which is a lender's cost to make a loan and not the price of acquiring an enquiry. Every price circulating on this question traces back to a party selling into it. That is why this page names billing models and questions instead of a figure.