As listed on vendor pricing pages in September 2026, insurance leads cost from $0.25 for a year-old aged auto record to $225 for a commercial truck live transfer. At one vendor that publishes its prices, fresh exclusive leads cost $35 for auto, $45 for home and $65 for life. The shared-lead marketplaces we checked publish no price at all.
Most articles that rank for this question give a range with no source, and several of them sell leads. Every price below links to the vendor page it came from, fetched on September 27, 2026. Where a vendor quotes privately, the table says so. We should also say up front that we don’t sell leads by the unit. We build and run outbound for agencies, so read the section on building your own pipeline with that in mind.
Insurance lead prices by type and line
All prices are per lead, as listed in September 2026.
| Lead type | Auto | Home | Life | Health / Medicare | Commercial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shared, sent to several agents | Quote-based (not published) | Quote-based (not published) | Quote-based (not published) | Quote-based (not published) | Quote-based (not published) |
| Exclusive, fresh (InsureLeads) | $35 | $45 | $65 | $45 ACA / $70 Medicare | $110 commercial truck; other lines quote-based |
| Contact-verified exclusive (InsureLeads) | $50 | $60 | $90 | $65 / $95 | $150 commercial truck |
| Live transfer (InsureLeads) | $90 | $100 | $160 | $100 / $125 | $225 commercial truck |
| Aged, orders under 250 | $0.75 to $3.50 | $0.75 to $2.50 | $0.80 to $4.50 | $0.50 to $2.50 | $2 to $12 commercial truck |
| Data list, no inquiry (ListShack) | $50 a month plan | $50 a month plan | $50 a month plan | $50 a month plan | $50 a month plan |
How to read it:
- Exclusive means InsureLeads sells the record to one buyer. Its prices include state-level targeting. County, ZIP and narrow filters cost extra, covered below.
- Contact-verified means someone at the vendor reached the consumer and confirmed interest before delivery. A live transfer is billable only when the call connects for at least 90 seconds and the prospect confirms interest.
- Aged prices come from Aged Lead Store for the four consumer lines and InsureLeads for commercial truck. Each range runs from the oldest band to the freshest for small orders. Bigger orders drop auto, home and life to $0.25 a record and health to $0.20.
- Data list means a compiled list of people who never asked you for a quote. ListShack’s $50 plan allows up to 50,000 records a month, and its FAQ describes both consumer and business records. The price does not change by line.
- Commercial was the thinnest column. The only commercial line with a public price was InsureLeads’ commercial truck. InsuranceLeads.com sells business property and casualty leads without listing a price.
Why the shared row is empty
None of the large shared-lead sellers we checked would show a price.
InsuranceLeads.com says its leads go to 2 to 4 agents on average, and its pricing page says “the price below is all you pay.” No price appears below it. SmartFinancial asks you to call for a free price and traffic estimate, then takes a deposit and refills it automatically. EverQuote asks you to call about volumes and subsidized pricing in your area. Hometown Quotes has a regional director reach out about custom pricing.
So a shared lead’s price is set for your account, your state and your filters, after a sales call. Before you fund anything, get three answers in writing: the price per lead, the average number of agents each lead goes to, and what the return policy excludes.
What other guides claim
Here is what the pages ranking for this question say about one product, an exclusive auto lead:
| Source | Exclusive auto lead | What the source sells |
|---|---|---|
| ActiveProspect | $30 to $80 | Consent certification and lead routing software |
| SeniorCenterAgents | $40 to $100 | Inbound calls for senior-market agents |
| Maverick Marketing | $25 to $45 | Outbound billed per reply |
| InsureLeads blog | $35, and $15 to $30 in a later table | Exclusive leads |
| InsureLeads pricing page | $35 | Exclusive leads |
ActiveProspect and SeniorCenterAgents give no source for their ranges. Maverick says its figures come from marketplace pricing pages, but the four we opened, EverQuote, QuoteWizard, SmartFinancial and Hometown Quotes, show no public price. InsureLeads contradicts itself between two sections of one blog post, and its own price list settles it at $35.
A range without a source is someone’s estimate. The only price you can plan around is one a vendor will put in writing.
Cost per lead is the wrong number
The cost per insurance lead is the number vendors quote. A lead is only a chance to talk to someone, though. You are paying for policies, and three numbers sit between the two.
- Cost per contact is what you spent divided by the people you actually spoke to.
- Cost per quote is what you spent divided by the quotes you delivered.
- Cost per policy is what you spent, plus the staff time it took, divided by the policies you bound.
Here is one worked example using auto prices from the table. The prices are real. The rates and hours are examples, chosen to show the mechanics. They are not benchmarks. Swap in your own.
| Aged auto | Exclusive auto | Live transfer auto | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price per lead | $1.25 (31 to 85 days, order of 1,000 to 4,999) | $35 | $90 |
| Leads bought | 1,000 | 80 | 40 |
| Spend | $1,250 | $2,800 | $3,600 |
| Contact rate (example) | 10% | 50% | 100%, billed only on connection |
| Cost per contact | $12.50 | $70 | $90 |
| Quote rate of contacts (example) | 20% | 50% | 50% |
| Cost per quote | $62.50 | $140 | $180 |
| Bind rate of quotes (example) | 25% | 25% | 25% |
| Policies | 5 | 5 | 5 |
| Staff hours (example) | 50 | 15 | 10 |
| Staff cost at $29.94 an hour | $1,497 | $449.10 | $299.40 |
| All-in cost per policy | $549.40 | $649.82 | $779.88 |
The staff rate is the 2025 median pay for insurance sales agents from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Payroll taxes and benefits push the real figure higher.
Per lead, the transfer costs 72 times what the aged record does. Per policy, in this example, it costs about 1.4 times as much. The spread collapses once contact rate and time enter the math.
The example is also fragile. Halve the aged contact rate to 5% and the same $1,250 buys 2.5 policies, which puts aged at $1,098.80 a policy, the most expensive column. Nobody can tell you which lead type is cheapest for your agency. Your own contact, quote and bind rates can, and a small test batch will give you them.
Run your numbers through the insurance lead cost calculator. If you are choosing between the first two columns, exclusive vs. shared insurance leads goes deeper on the trade, and aged insurance leads covers how to work old records. The contact rate in every column also depends on how fast you call, which is the subject of speed to lead for insurance agencies.
What drives the price
All figures here are as listed in September 2026 on the pages linked in the table.
Exclusivity. InsureLeads’ fresh auto lead is $35, the contact-verified version $50 and a live transfer $90. Exclusive covers the record only. Keeping other agents out of your area is a separate InsureLeads product at $500 a month for consumer lines.
Line of business. At the same vendor, exclusive leads run $35 for auto, $45 for home, $65 for life, $70 for Medicare and $110 for commercial truck, so home insurance leads cost $10 more than auto before any filters. Aged records follow the same order. In small orders, Aged Lead Store’s freshest life records cost $4.50 and its freshest health records $2.50.
State and season. InsureLeads says its prices vary by state, filters and season, and labels its Medicare and ACA rows as seasonal. Medicare’s open enrollment runs October 15 to December 7, so expect Medicare pricing to move around that window.
Filters. InsureLeads adds 10% for specific counties, 15% for ZIP or tight-radius targeting, 10 to 15% for narrow age or coverage filters and 10% for rush delivery, capped at 30% combined. InsuranceLeads.com offers hundreds of optional filters at an extra charge, and adds 25% to the base price for its Premium Prospect leads and 50% for Qualified Prospect leads.
Real-time or aged. InsureLeads’ auto lead is $35 fresh, $2 at 30 to 90 days old and $0.25 after a year. The person is the same. What changed is time, and the chance that another agent has already called.
Volume. Aged Lead Store’s 31-to-85-day auto records fall from $2.00 each in orders under 250 to $0.70 in orders of 25,000 or more. InsureLeads takes 5% off at $5,000 to $9,999 a month in prepaid volume and 8% at $10,000 to $24,999.
The costs that are not on the invoice
Returns cover bad data, not lost races
Every return policy we read credits you for a disconnected number. None of the four below credits you when a prospect never answers or has already bought from someone else. With a shared lead, that is the outcome you are most exposed to.
- InsuranceLeads.com accepts returns within 10 days for disconnected numbers, duplicates, agents testing the system, students, obviously false details and language barriers.
- SmartFinancial allows 10 days and refuses returns when the consumer already bought from someone else, when calls go to voicemail, or when you got the same lead from another source. Accepted returns come back as account credit, never cash.
- Aged Lead Store replaces wrong numbers and disconnects up to 20% of an order.
- InsureLeads replaces objective defects and says plainly that it will not replace a lead because the prospect did not answer or the call did not close.
Minimums and prepayment
InsureLeads requires $2,500 to start exclusive leads, split into a $500 campaign build and $2,000 of lead credit, and $3,000 for live transfers. Everything is prepaid, with no net-30 terms for new buyers. At $35, that $2,000 of credit buys 57 auto leads. Aged Lead Store has a $200 minimum order. SmartFinancial takes a deposit and refills it automatically. InsuranceLeads.com takes no deposit, sets a $50 credit limit for new agents, and bills on the 1st and 16th of each month or when you hit the limit.
A minimum is also a test size. Decide before you buy how many leads you need to trust the result, and whether the minimum gets you there.
The dialer, the CRM and texting registration
Aged-lead volumes push you toward software. PhoneBurner lists its dialer from $140 per user a month, billed annually. HighLevel, a CRM and automation platform, starts at $97 a month. If you text leads from a 10-digit number, carriers require A2P 10DLC registration. Twilio passes through a $4.50 one-time brand fee for low-volume senders or $46 for standard brands, a $15 campaign vetting fee, $1.50 to $10 a month per campaign, and carrier fees on every message.
Staff time
Nobody invoices you for it. In the example above, staff time added $1,497 to a $1,250 aged purchase. Count the hours spent dialing, texting and logging, and put a rate on them.
Compliance
Under the FCC’s rules, autodialed or prerecorded telemarketing calls to a cell phone need the called party’s prior express written consent, and telephone solicitations to residential numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry are barred. In January 2025 the 11th Circuit vacated the FCC’s one-to-one consent rule in Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC. That rule would have required a separate consent for each seller, and it never took effect. Proving that a lead’s consent covers your call is still your job.
That proof costs money. ActiveProspect sells TrustedForm consent certificates on usage-based pricing, with a pay-as-you-go option, and its contracted tier requires a spend commitment of $24,000 or more a year. If you call data lists, you also pay for Do Not Call Registry access. The FTC charges $82 per area code for fiscal 2026 after the first five free ones. On October 1, 2026 that rises to $85, with a cap of $23,425 for every area code.
What building your own pipeline costs instead
Everything above is a purchase you repeat for as long as you want leads. The alternatives charge for a system instead, and they differ in what you keep.
| Model | How it is priced | What you have when you stop paying |
|---|---|---|
| Buy per lead | Per record, every month. $35 for exclusive auto at InsureLeads | The records you bought |
| Vendor-run ad funnel | InsureLeads’ managed pipeline for auto and home: $1,000 setup, $1,250 a month or 20% of ad spend, whichever is greater, and at least $2,500 a month in ads paid to the platform. 90-day initial term | The funnel, pixels and data, by the vendor’s terms |
| Outbound billed per reply | Maverick Marketing: from $30 per qualified reply, with a ZIP territory | The replies you already received |
| Outbound built and run for you | Scoped per agency, month to month. No per-lead fee | The prospect list |
| Build it in-house | Staff time, dialer, CRM, 10DLC and list data | Everything, and all the upkeep |
Perspicality sits in the fourth row. For an insurance agency, we source the prospects it sells to, by its lines and its geography. We run daily SMS and email from our own numbers, domains and 10DLC registration, route every reply to the producer who can quote, and build the intake, follow-up and reporting tools behind it. The list belongs to the agency, so every lead on it is exclusive by construction. We don’t publish a price, because we scope each engagement before quoting it, and we work month to month. The Coverage Insurance Agency case study shows what that looks like in practice.
Building is the wrong answer when you need conversations this month. A pipeline takes weeks before the first real reply, and a purchased lead arrives today. You can run both: buy while the pipeline matures, then wind purchases down as your own supply comes up. The general case is in buying leads vs. building your own pipeline. The insurance version, with every route that skips the per-lead fee, is how to get insurance leads without buying them.
What to do with these numbers
- Get the shared price in writing. Ask for the price per lead, the average number of agents per lead and the return exclusions before you fund an account.
- Buy a test batch sized to answer a question. Track contacts, quotes and policies from it, and count the hours.
- Compare sources on cost per policy. A $1.25 lead and a $90 lead can land within a few hundred dollars of each other per policy, in either order.
- Price the build if you plan to be here in two years. Per-lead spend never becomes an asset. A list you own does.
For the full picture of where agents find business, start with leads for insurance agents. To compare the vendors named here and others side by side, see the best insurance lead companies.
Common questions
How much does an insurance lead cost?
As listed on vendor pricing pages in September 2026, from $0.25 for a year-old aged auto record to $225 for a commercial truck live transfer. One vendor that publishes prices lists fresh exclusive leads at $35 for auto, $45 for home and $65 for life. The shared-lead marketplaces we checked quote each account after a sales call.
How much do auto insurance leads cost?
InsureLeads lists exclusive auto leads at $35, contact-verified at $50 and live transfers at $90, as listed in September 2026. Aged Lead Store sells aged auto leads from $3.50 a record for the freshest small orders down to $0.25 for older records bought 25,000 at a time. Shared auto leads are quote-based.
How much do life insurance leads cost?
InsureLeads lists exclusive life leads at $65 and life live transfers at $160, as listed in September 2026. Aged Lead Store prices aged life leads at $4.50 for records up to 30 days old and $0.80 for records 86 to 365 days old, in orders under 250 leads, with lower prices for larger orders.
How much do health insurance leads cost?
InsureLeads lists exclusive ACA and health leads at $45 and Medicare leads at $70, with live transfers at $100 and $125, as listed in September 2026. It labels both rows as seasonal. Aged Lead Store sells aged health leads from $2.50 down to $0.20 a record, depending on how old the record is and how many you buy.
Is buying insurance leads worth it?
It can be, when your contact, quote and bind rates turn the lead price into a cost per policy your commissions cover. Buy a small batch, track what it becomes, and compare cost per policy between sources. Buying makes the most sense when you need conversations this month and someone on your team can call within minutes.
How do you get insurance leads without buying them?
Referrals, your existing book, local partners, content that answers buyers' questions, and outbound you run or have run for you. Each trades a per-lead fee for time or setup cost, and each leaves you with contacts nobody else was sold. Our guide to getting insurance leads without buying them lays out the trade-offs route by route.
