Playbooks/What leads cost
Not what a lead vendor quotes — what the market is bidding, from Google's own tool, and what that works out to per policy actually issued.
How much do life insurance leads cost?
Across 88 life insurance lead keywords in Google Keyword Planner for the year to August 2026, the median top-of-page bid in the United States was $16.81 per click, ranging from $8.89 to $48.89. That is the cost of one visitor, not one lead and not one policy. At a 1% click-to-policy rate, one issued policy costs around $1,681 in media alone.
Lead vendors quote a price per lead. That price is downstream of something more public: what agencies are bidding to reach the same person on a search results page. Google publishes those bid ranges in Keyword Planner, so anyone can check them.
Across 88 life insurance lead keywords carrying bid data in this export, the median top-of-page bid was $16.81. A quarter of the keywords sat above $23.17. The cheapest was $8.89 and the dearest $48.89.
| Top-of-page bid | Per click |
|---|---|
| Lowest in the set | $8.89 |
| 25th percentile | $14.18 |
| Median | $16.81 |
| 75th percentile | $23.17 |
| Highest in the set | $48.89 |
The head term, life insurance leads, carried a range of $5.17 to $16.04 at high competition. The most expensive keywords are the ones where the searcher is furthest along — already looking for a vendor:
| Keyword | Low | High |
|---|---|---|
| best life insurance lead sources | $11.74 | $48.89 |
| life insurance leads direct | $7.87 | $40.15 |
| real time life insurance leads | $4.68 | $37.07 |
| lead vendors for life insurance | $9.37 | $36.50 |
| life insurance lead providers | $4.29 | $30.83 |
The bid is the start of the arithmetic, not the end of it. Between a click and a commission there are three conversions, and each one divides:
Multiply them. Ten percent, then a half, then a fifth is one percent end to end — a hundred clicks per issued policy. At the median $16.81 bid, that is $1,681 of media cost for one policy, before the producer's time, before the cost of the appointment, and before any chargeback on a policy that lapses in year one.
Those percentages are placeholders. Yours will be different, which is the point — put your own in and see what your number actually is.
Worth saying plainly, because an argument that only runs one way is not worth reading. Paid acquisition does something an existing book cannot: it produces volume on demand, it is predictable enough to staff against, and it reaches people who have never heard of you. An agency that needs to add producers, or that has genuinely exhausted its own book, is buying something real.
The common case is narrower and more expensive: an agency buys leads at $16.81 a click while sitting on a book of people who already bought from it once — term policies inside a conversion window, policies with no servicing producer, annuities out of surrender, level term about to reprice.
The media cost of reaching those people is zero. You already have the contact detail, and they already know the name on the envelope. What it costs is postage and the work of finding them — which is arithmetic against a spreadsheet, not a bid war.
That is not an argument to stop buying leads. It is an argument about order: the cheapest policy you will write this year is one you are already entitled to ask for.
It depends on how the lead is bought, but the floor is visible in what agencies bid for the click. Across 88 life insurance lead keywords in Google Keyword Planner for the year to August 2026, the median top-of-page bid was $16.81, ranging from $8.89 to $48.89. That is the price of one visitor, before any of them become a lead.
Because the lifetime value of a life insurance client is high enough to justify it, and because the buyers are bidding against each other rather than against the value. A market where everyone knows the commission can support a $20 click will converge on a $20 click.
The only rates worth planning against are your own, out of your own system. What matters more than the benchmark is measuring all three steps separately — click to lead, lead to appointment, appointment to issued policy — because a funnel that looks acceptable in aggregate usually has one step doing all the damage.
It can be, and this page is not an argument that it never is. Paid acquisition buys volume and predictability that an existing book cannot. The argument is narrower: most agencies buy leads before they have worked the book they already own, which is the same product at a fraction of the acquisition cost.
Not advice. This page describes how these situations generally work. Policy terms, carrier rules and state regulations vary, and the governing document is always the contract. Confirm anything you act on with the carrier, and take compliance questions to your own counsel or compliance officer.
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