Insurance agents get leads from nine places: shared internet leads, exclusive internet leads, live transfers, aged leads, data lists, referral partners, their own book, inbound marketing, and outbound. The ones worth paying for are leads you can reach first and place with a carrier you are appointed with. Judge each source by its cost per policy written, not per lead.
Most pages ranking for this search come from companies selling one of those nine. So does this one. Perspicality builds and runs outbound for agencies, the last source on the list, and does not sell leads by the unit. Every price below is from the vendor’s own page, as listed in September 2026.
The short version
- New agent, no book yet. Start with referral partners and a complete Google Business Profile. Buy aged leads only to practice on the phone.
- Established personal lines agency. Work your own book first. Then buy exclusive leads or live transfers with a test budget and track cost per policy.
- Commercial lines. Lead vendors’ commercial catalogs are narrow. Referral partners and outbound aimed at the businesses your carriers want do most of the work.
- Life, health and Medicare. Catalogs lean on live transfers and seasonal leads, and Medicare Advantage bans unsolicited calls and texts. Read the rules section before you buy.
Every source, side by side
| Source | What you get | Price, as listed Sept 2026 | Who else gets it | Speed and contact | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shared internet leads | A shopper’s quote form, sold in real time | Quoted by sales or set by bidding. EverQuote, QuoteWizard and SmartFinancial show no rate card on their agent pages | Several agents, plus carriers | A race decided in minutes | Agencies that answer within minutes, evenings included |
| Exclusive internet leads | The same form, one buyer | $35 auto, $45 home, $65 life at InsureLeads, $2,500 minimum | Nobody buys that vendor’s copy | Fast, no race for that record | Small offices that cannot win a dialing race |
| Live transfers | A screened shopper, live on your line | $90 auto, $100 home, $160 life per transfer at InsureLeads | Nobody, if exclusive | Instant, during call-center hours | Agents who can stay by the phone |
| Aged leads | Old internet leads, resold | $3.50 down to $0.25 per auto lead at Aged Lead Store | Everyone who bought it before you | Low contact, no race | New producers, high-volume dialers |
| Data lists | Records matching your criteria. Nobody asked to hear from you | Salesgenie from $99 a month, 12-month term | Other subscribers | You make first contact, under strict rules | Direct mail, commercial prospecting |
| Referral partners | Introductions from realtors, lenders, CPAs | Your time. Fees are state-regulated | Nobody | Warm, slow to build | Everyone, especially home and commercial |
| Your own book | Cross-sell, renewals, reviews, referrals | Staff time | Nobody | Warm, quickest to close | Every agency with customers |
| Inbound marketing | Searches and quote forms that find you | Free to set up, then time | Nobody | Arrives when the searcher is ready | Agencies with a local market |
| Outbound | Prospects you choose and contact first | Your time, or a monthly engagement quoted to scope | Nobody, if the list is yours | Weeks to start, then daily | Commercial lines, long-term plans |
The nine sources, one at a time
1. Shared internet leads
Somebody fills in a comparison form on a quote site, and the site sells it to several buyers within seconds. This is what most people mean by “internet leads”.
Know who else is bidding. MediaAlpha, one of the big insurance exchanges, says 16 of the top 20 US auto carriers buy on its platform, bidding on each shopper in real time. Part of your competition for a real-time auto lead is a carrier’s own marketing budget.
The marketplaces agents use most rarely print a price. None of EverQuote, QuoteWizard, SmartFinancial or Hometown Quotes shows a rate card on its agent page, as checked in September 2026. Each sends you to a form or a phone call. Our breakdown of insurance lead costs collects what is published.
The first agent to reach a shopper usually frames the quote, which is why speed to lead often matters more than price. If nobody can call within minutes, including at 8pm, you are paying to come second. Exclusive vs. shared leads covers when the race is worth running.
2. Exclusive internet leads
Same form, one buyer. InsureLeads publishes a rate card, which is rare in this business: $35 for an exclusive auto lead, $45 for home and $65 for life, with a $2,500 minimum on fresh exclusive leads (as listed in September 2026).
Exclusive does not mean the shopper filled in one form. It is a promise about one vendor’s copy. A shopper who visited three quote sites sits on three vendors’ lists, each copy sold as exclusive. You still need to be fast. You just stop racing agents who bought the identical record.
They fit a small office that cannot staff a dialing race but can reach every lead within the hour.
3. Live transfers and inbound calls
A call center screens the shopper and transfers them to you while they are still on the line. Searchers call these “live leads”. InsureLeads lists $90 per auto transfer, $100 for home and $160 for life (September 2026).
Three things decide whether transfers pay: what counts as a billable call, what the screener asks before sending it, and whether you can answer every time during the vendor’s calling hours. Ask what you are billed when a transfer reaches your voicemail.
4. Aged leads
Internet leads that are days or months old, resold at a discount. Aged Lead Store lists auto leads at $3.50 each for 3 to 30 days old in small orders, falling to $0.25 for leads 86 to 365 days old in orders of 25,000 or more (as listed in September 2026).
The low price pays for three problems. Many of these shoppers bought weeks ago. Fewer answer as the record ages. And the shopper made the inquiry to someone else: under the federal Do Not Call rules, an inquiry creates a business relationship for only three months, and only with the business they asked. Aged leads are good practice for a new producer and a volume source for a call center with cheap hours. For a small agency they make a poor main channel. Our guide to aged insurance leads covers how to work them.
5. Data lists
A data list is names and contact details matching criteria you pick, such as homeowners in a ZIP code or businesses running trucks. Nobody on it asked to hear from you. Salesgenie, a common one, starts at $99 a month on a 12-month term (Salesgenie help center).
That changes every rule. You can mail a data list. You can email it under CAN-SPAM, which requires a real postal address and a working opt-out honored within 10 business days (FTC guide). You can call it after scrubbing it against the national Do Not Call registry. Texting it runs into the carrier rules covered below.
6. Referral partners
Realtors, lenders, auto dealers, CPAs and property managers meet people the week they need coverage. A partner who sends three closings a month beats most lead budgets, and the price is service: quoting their client the same day, every time.
Paying for referrals is a state question. North Carolina’s Department of Insurance, for one, says whether a fee to an unlicensed referral source is allowed depends on the facts, and that a referral stops being a referral once the person discusses policy terms (NCDOI referral fee FAQ). Check your state before you promise anyone a fee.
7. Your own book
The cheapest lead you will ever get is a customer you already have. Every monoline auto customer is a home or umbrella conversation. Every renewal is a chance to review coverage before the client starts shopping. Every happy customer is a review and a referral, if somebody asks.
The rules are friendlier too. A customer who bought from you in the last 18 months has an established business relationship with your agency, so a sales call to them is not a telephone solicitation under the Do Not Call rules (47 CFR 64.1200(f)(5) and (f)(15)). It does not replace the written consent needed for autodialed or prerecorded marketing calls and texts.
This is where we usually suggest an agency start, because it costs less than cold outreach and converts better. Our insurance agency work runs this warm lane on the same system as the cold one.
8. Inbound marketing: local search, your Google Business Profile, content
Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence, and says nobody can pay for a better local ranking (Google Business Profile help). You control a complete, accurate profile that names the lines you write, and your reviews, which Google says can help.
Past the profile, you need a quote form that lands somewhere a person watches, and pages that answer the questions clients ask you. It is the slowest source here, and one of the few that gets cheaper the longer you keep at it. The playbook on getting insurance leads without buying them covers it step by step.
9. Outbound, run yourself or built for you
Outbound means you pick the prospects and make first contact, by phone, email, mail or walking in. That suits commercial lines, where you can name the businesses you want before they go shopping.
Run it yourself and the cost is your hours plus tools. Scrub calls against a Do Not Call registry copy no more than 31 days old, call between 8am and 9pm in the prospect’s time zone, keep your own do-not-call list (47 CFR 64.1200(c)), and follow CAN-SPAM for email. The usual failure is consistency. Prospecting is the first thing a producer drops when service work piles up.
Have it built and run for you and someone else does the sourcing, sending and routing. This is what Perspicality does. We source the prospects an agency sells to, run daily SMS and email from our own numbers, domains and 10DLC registration, and route every reply to the producer who can quote. The list belongs to the agency, so the leads are exclusive by construction. The tradeoff is time: sending starts within the first few weeks, and it only pays if somebody answers the replies. It fits commercial lines best. See lead generation for insurance agencies and the outbound engine behind it.
Whoever runs it, ask whose numbers send the messages, who registered the texting campaign, how fast opt-outs are honored, and who owns the list when you stop paying.
How the choice changes by line
Our own insurance work is in P&C, with a commercial brokerage. The rows for life, health and Medicare come from vendors’ published products and the federal rules, not from campaigns we ran.
| Line | Sources that tend to pay | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Personal auto | Your own book, filtered exclusive leads or transfers, local search | Leads you cannot place. Filter to drivers your carriers will write |
| Homeowners | Realtor and lender partners, renewals, exclusive leads | Carrier appetite by ZIP. A lead in a closed territory is wasted money |
| Commercial | Outbound, referral partners such as CPAs, your own book | Narrow vendor catalogs. InsureLeads’ only commercial line is trucking, at $110 exclusive and $225 per transfer |
| Life and final expense | Live transfers, aged leads, direct mail | Catalogs built for telesales. InsureLeads lists life at $65 exclusive, $160 per transfer |
| Health (ACA) | Seasonal leads around Open Enrollment | Volume bunches into a few months |
| Medicare Advantage | Inbound requests, contact the beneficiary starts | CMS bans unsolicited calls, texts and voicemail, including calls based on referrals |
In every line, a lead is worth its price only if one of your carriers will write it.
How to evaluate a lead vendor
Get these answers in writing before you pay.
- How many buyers get each lead? You want a cap, not an average. For exclusive leads, ask whether aged copies get resold later.
- Where does the traffic come from? The vendor’s own sites, or leads bought from other vendors and resold? The further a lead travels, the thinner its consent trail.
- Whose name is on the consent? Ask for the consent record for each lead, such as a TrustedForm certificate, a timestamped, replayable record of the form the consumer filled in. If your agency’s name was not on the form, ask how the vendor thinks that consent covers you.
- What is the return policy? What qualifies, how many days you have, and whether you get cash or credit.
- What filters can you set? State, ZIP, line, homeowner, prior insurance, phone type. Filters keep you buying only what you can place.
- What are the minimums and the term? InsureLeads starts fresh exclusive orders at $2,500. Salesgenie’s term is 12 months. Know how you leave before you start.
- How is it delivered? In real time, to your CRM or a producer’s phone, not a daily email.
For reviews, read agents on independent forums, not the testimonials on the vendor’s page. Our comparison of insurance lead companies runs these questions against the vendors agents ask about most.
Consent, the TCPA and texting: the rules as of September 2026
Most pages on this topic skip it or get it wrong. Here is what the rules say, each with its primary source. This is not legal advice, so talk to a TCPA lawyer before you text or autodial a purchased list.
The penalty. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act lets a consumer sue for $500 per violation, and a court can triple it when the violation is willful or knowing (47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(3)). A campaign is thousands of messages. Florida’s Telephone Solicitation Act sets the same $500 figure (Fla. Stat. § 501.059).
What needs written consent. Marketing calls to a cell phone made with an autodialer or a prerecorded voice need prior express written consent (47 CFR 64.1200(a)(2)): a signed agreement, electronic signatures included, that “clearly authorizes the seller” to make those calls (64.1200(f)(9)). For any bought lead, the question is whether the form the consumer signed authorizes your agency.
The one-to-one rule is gone. In 2023 the FCC adopted a rule requiring consent to one seller at a time, which would have ended the long lists of “marketing partners” under comparison forms. The 11th Circuit vacated it on January 24, 2025, in Insurance Marketing Coalition v. FCC (opinion), before it took effect. The FCC formally restored the old definition effective August 29, 2025 (Federal Register). At least one lead vendor’s 2026 compliance guide still describes the rule as in force. It is not. The reverse myth is wrong too: the rule never banned buying leads.
The old definition still requires consent that authorizes the seller, so a form listing a hundred partners may still need defending. And no state law changed with the vacatur.
Texts count. The Do Not Call rules apply to texts sent to cell phones (64.1200(e)). A consumer can revoke consent by replying stop, quit, end, revoke, opt out, cancel or unsubscribe, or by any other reasonable means, and you must honor it within 10 business days (64.1200(a)(10)). Florida adds a step for texts: before suing, a consumer has to reply STOP and give the sender 15 days to cease.
Carriers have their own rules. CTIA’s Messaging Principles, the wireless industry’s guidelines, say an opt-in is not transferable and that senders “should not use opt-in lists that have been rented, sold, or shared” (sections 5.1.2.2 and 5.1.4). Business texting from a ten-digit number runs on 10DLC, where carriers ask the texting provider to register who is sending and what each campaign is, through The Campaign Registry (TCR overview). Texting a bought lead list from your own number means registering a campaign whose consent someone else collected, on a channel whose guidelines tell you not to.
Medicare. CMS rules for Medicare Advantage ban unsolicited telephone solicitation, robocalls, texts and voicemail, and count calls based on referrals as unsolicited (42 CFR 422.2264). A Medicare lead has to be someone who asked to be contacted.
A working checklist:
- Keep the consent record for every purchased lead, and check that it names your agency.
- Scrub calling lists against the national registry, on a copy no more than 31 days old, and against your own do-not-call list.
- Call between 8am and 9pm in the prospect’s time zone.
- Text a purchased lead only if its consent record names your agency, and only from numbers registered for that purpose.
- Honor opt-outs the moment they arrive. Ten business days is the legal ceiling, not a target.
- If you sell in Florida or another state with its own telephone solicitation law, read that law too.
What a lead is worth: cost per policy, not cost per lead
A $3.50 lead and a $35 lead cannot be compared until you know how many of each it takes to write a policy. Divide total lead spend by policies written, then compare that with what a new policy pays you over the years it stays on the books, less the producer hours it took. Per-lead pricing hides the two costs that push this up: records you never reach, and the hours spent dialing them.
The arithmetic, with placeholder close rates: at InsureLeads’ $35 exclusive auto price, one policy per ten leads costs $350 in leads. At Aged Lead Store’s $3.50, you match that only if one aged lead in a hundred becomes a policy, after dialing ninety more records. Those ratios show the math. They are not benchmarks, and we will not quote a close rate we cannot source. Put your own numbers into the insurance lead cost calculator.
Working the leads you get
Before you blame a vendor, measure what happens to a lead in its first hour. The form lands in an inbox nobody watches, waits for the right producer, gets one call and no text, or arrives Saturday and gets a Monday callback. Make the first touch independent of who is free: instant acknowledgement, routing to a named producer, and follow-up across call and text at different hours. The speed-to-lead playbook walks through each step. What to automate before hiring a producer covers the retyping that eats the rest of the day.
When to build your own pipeline instead
Many agencies buy while they build, then wind the buying down. The general case is in buying leads vs. building your own pipeline. For an agency, these are the signs it is time to build:
- You have bought leads for a year and still win on dialing speed rather than advice.
- You write commercial lines, where the businesses you want never fill in a comparison form.
- You want a list you still own when you sell the agency.
- Somebody will answer replies the same day. Without that, do not build anything.
Coverage Insurance Agency, a growing commercial brokerage, was chasing leads one text at a time, typed by a person, with no front door online. We built a marketing site that captures quote requests, email and SMS outreach with two-way replies routed back to the team, and a live dashboard of what is sent, answered and clicked. Florida regulates how insurance is advertised, and a brokerage places coverage rather than insuring it, so an automated check rejects “we insure” before a message can send. Each piece was in use the day it shipped. The Coverage Insurance Agency case study has the full story.
What to do this month
- Measure your real response time, and fix intake before you buy more leads.
- Pull your monoline customers, the renewals due in the next two months, and the clients you have never asked for a review.
- Finish your Google Business Profile and book time with three referral partners.
- If you buy, buy one source and track cost per policy for two months before adding another.
- If you sell commercial lines, or you are tired of racing other agents to the same shopper, tell us how leads reach you today. We will tell you honestly whether outbound fits, including when it does not.
Common questions
How can I get more leads as an insurance agent?
Start with the customers you already have: cross-sell monoline policies, call renewals before the carrier notice lands, and ask happy clients for referrals. Then build two or three referral partners and a complete Google Business Profile. Buy leads last, one source at a time, and keep one only if its cost per policy beats what the policy earns.
Where can I get free leads for insurance agents?
Free leads cost time instead of money. The best sources are your own book, referral partners such as realtors, lenders and CPAs, a complete Google Business Profile with reviews, and website pages that answer the questions clients ask you on the phone. Google does not sell better local rankings, so that work is open to every agency.
How much does it cost to buy insurance leads?
As listed in September 2026, InsureLeads charges $35 for an exclusive auto lead and $90 for an auto live transfer, with a $2,500 minimum on fresh exclusive leads. Aged Lead Store sells aged auto leads from $3.50 down to $0.25 each. The large shared marketplaces, such as EverQuote and QuoteWizard, show no rate card on their agent pages; their sales teams quote you.
What are the best insurance leads?
The best lead is one you can reach before anyone else and place with a carrier you are appointed with. For most agencies that puts their own customers and referrals first, exclusive leads and live transfers next, and shared or aged leads last. The right answer is the source with the lowest cost per policy on your own numbers.
Where do insurance companies get their leads from?
Carriers buy the same comparison-shopping traffic agents buy, often through real-time exchanges. MediaAlpha, one of the largest, says 16 of the top 20 US auto carriers buy on its platform. Carriers also advertise directly and market to their own customers. When you buy a real-time internet lead, you may be bidding against a carrier's own budget.
Is buying leads worth it?
It is when your cost per policy sits well below what the policy earns you after producer time, and someone can reach each lead within minutes. It is not when leads wait in an inbox or you cannot place most of them. Test one source, track cost per policy for two months, and keep it only if the math holds.
What are leads in insurance?
A lead is contact information for a person or business that might buy a policy, plus a sign of interest, such as a quote form, a call or a referral. A record on a purchased data list is not a lead in that sense, because nobody on it asked to hear from you, and that changes the consent rules.
