Guide · Personal injury economics

What personal injuryleads actually cost

Legal is the most expensive industry in paid search, and personal injury is the expensive end of legal. Here is the published data, what it does not say, and how to price shared leads against exclusive ones.

Scope. This page is about single-event injury work: motor vehicle collisions, slip and fall, premises liability. Mass tort is a different business with different lead tiers and economics that turn on when you enter the litigation, and it has its own guide.

Everything below is about what a lead costs. What a signed case costs is the number that decides whether any of it works, and that is on the cost per signed case guide.

The published figures

Legal is the mostexpensive industryin paid search

WordStream by LocaliQ, 2026 Search Advertising Benchmarks, US
	Attorneys & Legal Services	All industries
Average cost per click	$9.87	$5.42
Average cost per lead	$131.63	$66.69
Conversion rate	—	8.18%
Our arithmetic: implied legal conversion rate	7.50%	—

Source: WordStream by LocaliQ, 2026 Search Advertising Benchmarks, covering United States search campaigns from April 2025 to March 2026 across more than twenty industries. Attorneys and Legal Services carries both the highest cost per click and the highest cost per lead of any industry measured. The next highest click costs were Home and Home Improvement at $8.33 and Dentists at $8.00; the lowest was Arts and Entertainment at $1.63. The implied conversion rate on the last row is our own calculation from the published cost per click and cost per lead, not a figure the report prints.

The clicks cost about 1.8 times the all-industry average. The leads cost about 2 times it. That gap is the interesting part, because it means legal clicks convert slightly worse than average, not better. Divide the click cost by the lead cost and the implied conversion rate is around 7.5%, against an 8.18% all-industry figure.

You are paying nearly double for traffic that converts a little below average. The disadvantage compounds rather than canceling out.

What that table is not

"Attorneys and Legal Services" is the whole legal category. It includes family, criminal, immigration, estate and everything else. It is not a personal injury figure.

Personal injury sits at the expensive end of that category, so $9.87 is best read as a floor for injury work rather than an estimate of it. Anyone presenting the category average as a PI number is either being careless or hoping you will not check.

Personal injury specific cost-per-lead figures do circulate. The ones we could find trace back through secondary summaries to older editions with unclear provenance, so we have not printed them. Your own market will differ from any national figure by more than the difference between these two columns anyway.

An hour, and free

Get the numberfor your market

A national average across twenty industries cannot run your budget. The figure you need is specific to your city and your case types, and you can pull it yourself.

Pull your own terms, geo-targeted

Use the keyword planner with the location set to the cities you actually serve, and query the specific case types you take rather than "personal injury lawyer". The spread between a head term and a specific matter type is usually large.

Convert clicks into leads

Multiply through by your own landing page conversion rate, not a benchmark. If you do not know it, that is the first thing to fix, because every number downstream depends on it.

Then keep going to signed cases

Cost per lead is a purchasing metric. Carry it through your consult and sign rates before comparing anything to anything, or you will draw the wrong conclusion confidently.

The comparison everyone gets wrong

Shared leads are notcheaper. They aredifferently priced.

A shared lead goes to several firms at once. It costs a fraction of an exclusive lead and it converts at a fraction of the rate. Whether that is a good trade is arithmetic, not opinion.

Shared

Leads bought: 100
Price each: $150
Total spend: $15,000
Sign rate: 4%
Cost per signed case: $3,750

Exclusive

Leads bought: 100
Price each: $450
Total spend: $45,000
Sign rate: 12%
Cost per signed case: $3,750

Shared wins only when the sign-rate ratio beats the price ratio If a shared lead costs a third of an exclusive one, it has to convert at better than a third of the exclusive rate. In the illustration above the two land exactly level. Drop the shared sign rate by a single point and exclusive is a third cheaper per case.

Figures illustrative, as always. The point is the structure: cheap leads are not automatically worse and expensive leads are not automatically better, and the only way to know which you have is to track sign rate by source rather than in aggregate. Most firms buying both track them together, which makes the comparison impossible.

Three things change the calculation and none of them appear on an invoice. Speed matters far more on shared leads, because you are racing three other firms rather than deliberating; a shared lead answered in two minutes and one answered in twenty are different products. The client experience is worse, since being called by four firms in ten minutes does not make anybody feel well served. And your own reputation absorbs some of that, whether or not you were the polite one.

If you are buying shared leads, response time is not a nice-to-have, it is the entire strategy. That is covered properly on the intake conversion guide, and it is worth reading before you renew a lead contract.

The number we will not print

There is no honestcase value benchmark

We were asked to put case-value benchmarks on this page and we are not going to, because a defensible one does not exist. Single-event injury values turn on injury severity, on liability, on venue, and above all on the policy limits actually available. A published average across those variables is an average of matters that have almost nothing in common, and using it to set a budget produces a number with no relationship to your practice.

Any agency quoting you an average PI case value is quoting something they cannot source. Ask where it came from and watch what happens.

What you need instead is in your own closed files, and it takes an afternoon. Take three years of resolved matters, separate them by case type, and work out the average fee actually collected. Then apply the adjustment most firms skip: subtract the share of signed cases that produced no fee at all, because those consumed acquisition spend too. That gives you an expected value per signed case, which is the figure the whole budget should hang from. The method is on the cost per signed case guide.

Want your actual numbers instead of a benchmark?

Thirty minutes. Bring your lead costs by source and your last twelve months of signed matters, and we will work out which sources are paying and which are quietly not.

The benchmark figures on this page are from a named third-party report and describe the legal category as a whole rather than personal injury specifically. The shared and exclusive comparison uses illustrative figures to demonstrate a method and is not a claim about market prices. Nothing on this page is legal advice, and we are a marketing agency rather than your compliance counsel.

Questions firms ask us about this

Straightanswers

Is $9.87 what we should expect to pay per click?

No, and treating it that way is the most common mistake made with this report. It is an average across the entire legal category and across the whole United States. Personal injury is the expensive end of that category, and a competitive metropolitan market is the expensive end of the country.

Read it as a floor and as evidence that legal is structurally the priciest vertical in paid search. Then pull your own terms with the location set to the cities you serve, which takes about an hour and gives you a number you can actually budget against.

Are shared leads ever worth buying?

Sometimes, and the test is specific rather than philosophical. Shared wins when the sign-rate ratio beats the price ratio: if the shared lead costs a third as much, it has to convert at better than a third of your exclusive rate.

The practical obstacle is that most firms cannot answer that question because they track sign rate in aggregate rather than by source. Tag every lead with its source before you run the comparison, then let three months of data decide it instead of a sales rep.

Why does legal convert worse than average if the intent is so high?

The published figures imply it, and it is worth being careful about why. A conversion in this data means a form or a call, not a signed case. Legal searches carry enormous intent and also enormous competition, so a searcher who converts frequently converts with several firms at once.

There is also a research effect. Someone comparing four firms after a collision behaves differently from someone ordering a pizza, and a slower, more deliberate decision shows up as a lower conversion rate on any single site.

Should we buy leads at all, or just run our own ads?

Run the same sum on both. A purchased lead has a known price and an unknown quality; your own campaign has an unknown price and a lead you control end to end. Both resolve to cost per signed case, and that is the only basis on which they are comparable.

What we would not do is treat a lead vendor as a substitute for having your own acquisition working. Vendors change their pricing, their exclusivity terms and their buyer mix without asking you, and a firm with no channel of its own has no answer when that happens.

Next step

Thirty minutes.
No pitch deck.

We'll work out what your leads cost by source, what a signed case costs, and which channels are paying. More on the method at law firm marketing.

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