Somewhere right now, two agents are buying the "same" Medicare lead. One pays $11. The other pays $70. Here is the uncomfortable part: the $11 agent is usually the one getting robbed.
Cheap leads are the most expensive thing in insurance marketing, because you pay for them twice: once with money, then again with your closers' time. We buy insurance traffic for a living, across more than a million inbound calls, so the prices below come from live auctions, not a vendor's pricing page. And unlike a vendor, we have no reason to flatter any of these numbers.
The four things people call "insurance leads," priced
Lead vendors have a talent: they can make the same web form sound like four different products. Strip the branding away and everything on the market is one of these four, and the price tracks exactly one thing: how close the prospect is to a real conversation.
| Product line | Shared lead | Exclusive lead | Live transfer | Inbound call |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Auto insurance | $5 - $12 | $20 - $40 | $40 - $75 | $25 - $55 |
| Home insurance | $6 - $14 | $22 - $45 | $45 - $80 | $30 - $60 |
| Health / ACA | $8 - $18 | $25 - $55 | $50 - $100 | $35 - $70 |
| Life insurance | $8 - $20 | $30 - $60 | $55 - $110 | $40 - $80 |
| Medicare | $10 - $20 | $35 - $75 | $60 - $150 | $45 - $80+ |
| Final expense | $8 - $18 | $30 - $65 | $55 - $130 | $40 - $75 |
Typical US market ranges, October 2026. Your state, qualification bar and volume commitments move these meaningfully.
The only formula that matters before you spend a dollar
Most agents ask "how much do leads cost?" The better question is "how much can I afford to pay?" That number is personal, and it takes one line of math.
Take your commission per sold policy. Multiply it by your close rate on that lead type. That is your break-even lead price; pay comfortably under it and you print money, pay over it and no vendor discount will save you.
Worked example: a final expense policy pays you $600 in first-year commission and you close one in ten exclusive leads. Your break-even is $60 a lead. At the market rate of $30 to $65 you are fine at the bottom of the range and gambling at the top. Same math, live transfers at a one-in-five close: break-even $120, market price $55 to $130. Suddenly the "expensive" product is the safer buy. Run this once per lead type and most pricing debates end themselves.
Why two agents pay wildly different prices for the "same" lead
Five variables move the price more than anything else, and most sellers hope you never ask about them.
- Source intent. A lead from a Google search for "medicare advantage plans near me" is worth multiples of one scraped from a gift-card sweepstakes. Both get sold as "medicare leads." Ask what the person was doing when they became a lead.
- Exclusivity, really. Some vendors resell "exclusive" leads after thirty days. Get the resale window in writing or assume it is thirty days.
- Qualification bar. A 90-second minimum duration with state filtering costs more than a raw connect, and it is usually the best money in your whole funnel, because it buys back your closers' day.
- State and carrier appetite. The same auto lead costs more where carriers are actually writing policies. Lead prices follow carrier demand around the map like gulls follow a trawler.
- Consent quality. Leads with clean, logged TCPA consent cost more in 2026 because the ones without it are lawsuits with a phone number attached. Consent litigation keeps tightening the supply of clean records, and clean supply getting scarcer is half of why prices crept up this year.
What the numbers look like from the buying side
Here is the math most agents never see, because they buy the finished lead instead of the traffic behind it.
Running Google Ads in insurance, we have held cost per click to $0.88 across 481,000 clicks in Medicare and auto. If roughly one click in twenty becomes a qualified inbound call, the raw cost to produce that call sits in the high teens before creative, tracking and routing. The market then sells that same call for $45 to $80. The gap between those two numbers is the lead industry's margin. It is also the entire argument for eventually owning the machine instead of renting its output.
Buy leads or build your own? An honest decision list
Buying is renting: fast, no ad account needed, faucet on today. Building is owning: cost per call falls as campaigns optimize, the data and numbers are yours, and nobody else ever touches your lead. The tradeoff is real, so here is the decision the way we give it to clients on calls.
Red flags that mean walk away
- No source transparency. If a vendor cannot say what ad, platform and page produced the lead, assume the worst version of the answer.
- No TCPA consent records on demand. In 2026 that is not paperwork, that is survival. The FCC's own TCPA guidance is public; vendors who get vague about it have a reason.
- No replacement policy for wrong numbers and out-of-state records. Honest vendors credit junk without a fight.
- Prices dramatically below the table above. Nobody sells $8 live transfers out of generosity. Those are recycled, incentivized or robot-dialed, and your contact rate will tell you so by Friday.
Questions we get on this
Are insurance leads worth buying?
Yes, when the math works: lead cost divided by close rate must sit comfortably below what a policy pays you. Shared leads only pencil for teams that dial within minutes. If you cannot work a lead inside five minutes, pay up for exclusivity or inbound calls, or the cheap leads quietly become the expensive ones.
What is the cheapest way to get insurance leads?
Aged and shared leads are the cheapest per record and usually the most expensive per policy, because contact rates are low and competition is instant. The cheapest sustainable cost per acquisition almost always comes from owning your own campaigns once your volume justifies it.
Why are Medicare leads so expensive?
High carrier commissions, enrollment windows that compress demand into short seasons, and compliance rules that limit who can generate them properly. High value plus constrained clean supply equals the priciest leads in insurance.
Do aged insurance leads ever work?
Sometimes, for high-volume phone teams with aggressive dialers and nothing better to feed them. They are a volume play with single-digit contact economics, not a growth strategy.
How many leads do I need to sell one policy?
Plan on eight to fifteen shared leads, four to eight exclusive leads, or three to six live transfers or inbound calls per sold policy, depending on your product line and phone skills. If your numbers are meaningfully worse than that, the problem is usually speed to lead or script, not the lead source.
