How much a personal injury lead actually costs.
Shared personal injury leads are advertised at roughly $50 to $150 each, exclusive leads from about $250 up, and truck cases higher still. None of that tells you what you'll pay for a case you actually sign. Work backwards from your average fee and your sign rate instead - it's three lines of arithmetic, and it's the only number that decides whether buying leads makes sense for you.
Every price you'll find for a personal injury lead was published by somebody who sells personal injury leads. That doesn't make the numbers wrong. It does mean the number you actually care about — what you pay for a case you sign — is the one that never makes it onto the pricing page.
So here's what gets quoted, where those figures come from, and the three lines of arithmetic that turn a price into a decision.
The short answer
Shared personal injury leads are advertised at roughly $50 to $150 each. Exclusive leads start around $250 and climb from there. Truck and commercial-vehicle cases are quoted higher, because the cases are worth more.
Those ranges come from a May 2026 breakdown of vendor pricing by Rankings.io, and they line up with what firms tell us they're being quoted. Read them as advertised prices, because that's what they are.
The price per lead is not the price of a client. Between the two sits how many people answer the phone, how many of those have a case worth taking, and how many sign. That's where the real money goes.
What you'll actually be quoted
Four things move the number on the invoice.
Exclusivity. A shared lead goes to three or four firms at once. An exclusive lead goes to you. That single difference explains most of the spread between $80 and $400, and we've written up how to decide between them separately.
Case type. In the same Rankings.io breakdown, auto accident leads run $300 to $1,500, truck cases $500 to $1,500 and up, dog bites $80 to $200, and medical malpractice $40 to $200.
That medical malpractice number surprises people. The cases are worth the most and the leads cost the least. It's not a bargain — it's a signal. Almost none of those enquiries survive review, so you buy a great many to find one you'll take. Cheap per lead, expensive per case.
Your market. Los Angeles, New York and Chicago sit at the top of every range, because more firms are bidding on the same accident searches.
How the lead was made. Somebody who searched "car accident lawyer near me" and filled in a form is a different person from somebody who clicked an ad on a social feed. Ask which one you're buying.
The benchmark that doesn't divide
There's one set of figures that gets quoted across this entire industry, and it doesn't hold together.
Pareto Legal's 2026 analysis looked at $3.3 million of Google Ads and Local Services Ads spend across thirteen plaintiff-side firms. It reports three numbers for injury work: $284 per lead, a 7% lead-to-signed-case rate, and $468 per signed case.
Take the first two and do the division:
At $284 a lead and a 7% sign rate, a signed case costs about $4,057 — nowhere near the $468 the same report gives.
Not $468. The three figures can't all be describing the same set of cases — most likely they're drawn from different slices of the data, or "signed case" is counted differently than you'd assume. We've linked the source so you can read it yourself.
We're not calling it dishonest. We're pointing at it because that $468 gets repeated as a target, and a firm that treats it as one will conclude its own numbers are catastrophic when they're normal. Borrowed benchmarks are worth very little here. Yours are worth a lot.
Working out your own ceiling
Ten minutes and your last twenty cases. Here's the whole thing.
Step 1 — What's a signed case worth to you?
Your real average, including the small ones that settled quickly.
Use your real average, including the small ones that settled fast. The flattering number is the one that gets firms into trouble.
Step 2 — How much of that will you spend to get it?
You're willing to spend $900 in marketing to sign one case.
This one's a judgement call, not a calculation. Ten percent is a common starting point. Pick your own and write it down.
Step 3 — So what can you pay for one lead?
If seven leads in a hundred sign, $63 is the most you can pay for one.
At those inputs, $63 is your ceiling. A $300 exclusive lead loses money on every single purchase.
Which is not an argument against exclusive leads. It's an argument about sign rate. Push signing from 7% to 20% and the same $900 supports $180 a lead. Get your average fee to $15,000 and it supports more again. The ceiling moves when your business moves — not when you negotiate the invoice down by ten dollars.
And if your ceiling lands below every price you've been quoted, that is the answer — not a reason to redo the sums. It means bought leads don't work at your current fee and sign rate, and the money belongs in the lanes you own instead: the profile that shows up in the map pack, the reviews under it, the pages that answer what people search before they call. Those take weeks or months rather than days, and nobody resells them to three other firms the same afternoon.
Run the same three lines against every channel you pay for, and you'll see which ones clear. That's the same calculation behind what a firm should spend on marketing.
Most firms can't say which channel produced last month's signed cases — the calls, forms and chats never get tied back. We set that tracking up as part of the build, so the number in Step 3 is something you can look up instead of estimate.
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What moves the price more than negotiating
Answer speed changes your cost per case more than any discount a vendor will give you.
You bought the lead either way. Whether it becomes a case depends on who calls first — and with a shared lead you're racing three firms to the same phone. Reaching a person you already paid for costs you nothing extra and moves Step 3 directly. That's the intake problem, and it's worth more than the whole negotiation.
The second lever is qualification. If a third of what you're buying was never going to be a case, say so to the vendor with specifics — dates, names, what was wrong — and ask for credits. Good vendors issue them. The ones that argue are telling you something useful.
Then check the numbers again next month. Prices move, competitors enter, one channel quietly gets better while another gets worse. Read what produced signed cases, keep that, cut what didn't, and refine it month after month. A lead price you calculated once in March is a guess by June.
Questions about personal injury lead pricing
How much do personal injury leads cost?
Shared personal injury leads are commonly advertised between $50 and $150 each, and exclusive leads from roughly $250 up. Truck and commercial-vehicle cases are quoted higher because the cases are worth more. Those are advertised per-lead prices, not what you end up paying for a case you sign.
What's the difference in price between shared and exclusive leads?
Exclusive leads typically cost several times what a shared lead costs, because the vendor sells them to you alone rather than to three or four firms at once. Whether that premium is worth it depends entirely on how much more often you sign an exclusive lead.
What is a good cost per signed case for a personal injury firm?
There's no universal number, because it depends on your average fee. A workable rule is that your total marketing cost per signed case should sit comfortably under the share of the fee you're willing to spend on marketing. Calculate it from your own last twenty cases rather than an industry average.
Why do medical malpractice leads cost less than car accident leads?
Because far fewer of them turn into cases a firm will take. A cheap lead in a practice area with a very low qualification rate can cost more per signed case than an expensive lead in a straightforward one. Price per lead and price per case move independently.
How do I know what I can afford to pay per lead?
Multiply your average fee per signed case by the share of it you're willing to spend on marketing, then multiply that by your lead-to-signed-case rate. That gives you the most you can pay for one lead. Anything above it loses money on every purchase.
Should I renegotiate my per-lead price?
Negotiating the per-lead price is the smallest lever you have. Reaching leads faster and signing more of them moves your cost per case far more than a ten-dollar discount, and asking for credits on leads that were never qualified usually recovers more than a negotiation does.
