What a kitchen lead is worth on a nine-month decision

Two sets of numbers have landed in the past month that every kitchen and bath owner should lay side by side. This spring, Houzz published its 2026 Houzz & Home study, built on 20,358 homeowners surveyed between January and March. On Monday, WordStream by LocaliQ published its 2026 Google Ads benchmarks. One tells you what the rooms are worth. The other tells you what a click costs. What most firms leave out of the math is the time between the two.

What the rooms are worth

Houzz & Home reports what homeowners spent on 2025 projects, and the two rooms this trade builds lead the list:

• Kitchens: a median of $24,000, up from $22,000 in 2024.
• Primary bathrooms: $15,000, up from $13,000.
• Guest bathrooms: $7,000, up from $6,000.
• All renovations combined: $20,000, unchanged from the year before.

Houzz’s Kitchen Trends study, published in January, splits the kitchen figure by scope: a major remodel came in at a median of $55,000 and a minor one at $20,000.

Those medians hide a wide spread. Decide which job you are paying to attract before deciding what a lead is worth: a lead for a $55,000 kitchen and one for a $7,000 guest bath are not the same purchase.

How homeowners pay, and what that does to your offers

The same Houzz study asked how projects were funded. Savings remain the main source at 84%, but 34% used credit cards, up 5 points in a year, and 13% used a secured home loan. Among high-spend homeowners, 23% used secured loans, against 6% of those with smaller projects.

Budgets are loose. In 2025, 37% of renovating homeowners went over their planned spend, 35% came in on budget and only 3% finished under it, while a quarter started with no budget at all.

Two things follow for marketing. Honest price ranges by room do more filtering than any ad setting, because so many homeowners arrive without a number in mind. And financing offers carry rules: under Truth in Lending, an ad that names a monthly payment also has to state the APR, the down payment and the repayment terms.

What a click and a lead cost

There is no published benchmark for kitchen and bath remodelers specifically, so these are the nearest categories, each with its window:

• Google search, Home & Home Improvement: a median cost per click of $8.33 and a conversion rate of 8.05%, in WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2026 data covering April 2025 to March 2026. Across every industry, the median cost per lead was $66.69.
• Google search, Construction & Contractors (General): a median cost per click of $5.31, a conversion rate of 2.61% and a cost per lead of $165.67, in LocaliQ’s 2025 home services report covering April 2024 to March 2025. Home services as a whole came in at $90.92 per lead in the same report.
• Facebook ads with lead forms, Home & Home Improvement: a median cost per lead of $41.26 and a conversion rate of 5.22%, in WordStream’s 2025 Facebook ads report covering April 2024 to June 2025.

The low conversion rate in the contractor category matches what we see in remodeling accounts: many of the clicks are homeowners pricing a project, not booking one.

The part the benchmarks leave out: time

The Houzz & Home study also measured how long projects take. Kitchens averaged 9.5 months of planning and 5.8 months of construction in 2025. Primary bathrooms averaged 8.4 months of planning and 4.8 months of work.

That changes what a lead is. A kitchen inquiry paid for this week may not sign until the winter, and it may sign with whichever firm was still in touch in month eight. So:

• Cost per lead is measured in weeks; cost per signed contract is measured in seasons.
• The follow-up is part of what the lead costs. A lead nobody nurtures after the first call is mostly wasted spend.
• A channel that looks expensive in May may be the one that produced December’s contracts.

Here is the arithmetic we walk owners through. The close rates are illustrations, not benchmarks; your own records supply the real one. At the contractor-category median of $165.67, ten leads cost $1,656.70. If one of those ten signs a kitchen at the $24,000 median, the marketing cost about 7% of the contract. If it takes twenty leads to sign one, the share doubles to about 14%. Against a $55,000 major remodel, the same twenty leads come to about 6%.

Who else wants the same homeowner

Houzz & Home found general contractors were hired by 29% of renovating homeowners in 2025, against 8% who hired kitchen and bath remodelers. Design-build firms stood at 5%, up 2 points. In the Kitchen Trends study, general contractors were hired on 48% of kitchen projects.

The shortlist a homeowner builds will usually include generalists, so a lead that lands on a page saying nothing a generalist could not also say is a lead paid for and given away. The page has to make the specialist case: the design process, the lead times you manage, the rooms you have finished in that town.

Where we would put the next dollar

The market is flattening rather than falling. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, in its latest Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity, put first-quarter spending up 2.0% from a year earlier at $521 billion, and Pro Remodeler reported on May 7 that the forecast has growth slowing to 0.5% by the first quarter of next year, at $523 billion. In a flat year, money should go where it can be traced to contracts. For a firm doing kitchens and baths, our usual order is:

• The site and profile first. Galleries by room, ranges, a consult request that asks for room, budget and timeline. Every paid channel depends on it.
• Search on major-remodel terms, with negatives for DIY, parts and job seekers.
• Local Services Ads in the Kitchen remodeling and Bathroom remodeling categories, once reviews are strong and someone answers quickly.
• Facebook and Instagram for retargeting through the planning months, judged on consults booked rather than form fills.
• Houzz and lead sites only where a full season of tracking shows signed contracts at a price you can carry.

What to do this month

• Pull last year’s contracts and record, for each one, the lead source, the room, the value and the months from first contact to signature.
• Work out cost per signed contract by channel, not cost per lead.
• Add budget range and preferred build season to the consult form.
• Publish honest ranges by room on the site, drawn from your own job history.
• Put every consult that is not ready to sign into a follow-up that runs at least until the end of the year.
• Read every financing line on the site and in ads; any payment amount needs the APR and terms beside it.

No benchmark knows your close rate or how long your clients take to decide, but a year of your own contracts does. Our page for kitchen and bath remodelers shows how we plan around that, our Google Ads work covers the paid side, and our GoHighLevel builds are where the long follow-up lives.