What a Click Costs: UK Emergency Trade Ads Report 2026
What advertising emergency trade work on Google costs, 917,360 monthly UK searches, click prices by trade and region, and the London premium.
- Across four trades and 250 UK towns and cities we measured 917,360 emergency-trade Google searches a month, of which 69,220 carry explicit emergency intent.
- Typical (median) cost-per-click ranges from £4.62 (electrical) to £6.78 (heating); emergency-intent clicks run 1.9x to 2.7x higher again.
- London clicks cost 1.9x the England-outside-London average, £10.24 vs £5.47 (volume-weighted).
- You will see individual clicks quoted at £100+ (a "£147.88" plumbing click), but those sit on near-empty keyword auctions and are artefacts, not rates. Modelled across all four trades, the paid-search market is worth roughly £5.6M a month.
This report answers a single question: what does it cost to buy a customer's attention for emergency trade work on Google in the UK? It aggregates cost-per-click and search-volume data across roofing, plumbing, electrical and heating in 250 towns and cities. Every figure is sourced in the methodology below and is free to cite with attribution to GetTheCall.
The size of the market
Emergency trade work is one of the most search-driven service categories there is. Combined, the four trades generate 917,360 searches a month across our dataset, plumbing is the largest single trade at 409,100, followed by electrical (238,440), roofing (166,110) and heating (103,710).
Cost-per-click by trade
Click price is set by advertiser competition and job value, not search volume, which is why heating, the lowest-volume trade, has the highest typical click cost. Gas Safe scarcity and high-value boiler jobs push heating to the top; electrical, with the widest supply of tradespeople, sits lowest. Figures below are medians (robust to thin-keyword noise); the volume-weighted means sit a little higher, roofing £4.90, electrical £4.95, plumbing £6.84, heating £8.11.
| Trade | Median standard CPC | Median emergency CPC | Emergency premium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Heating | £6.78 | £13.16 | 1.9x |
| Plumbing | £6.46 | £15.92 | 2.5x |
| Roofing | £4.48 | £12.25 | 2.7x |
| Electrical | £4.62 | £11.62 | 2.5x |
Across every trade, adding the word "emergency" to a search multiplies its click cost, because urgency converts. On a median basis the gap ranges from 1.9x in heating (where even routine boiler clicks are dear) to 2.7x in roofing. Emergency-intent searches are only 7.5% of total volume but represent the most contested clicks on the internet for these trades.
The London premium
Where a click happens matters as much as what it is for. Volume-weighted across all four trades, a click in Greater London costs nearly double one in the rest of England.
| Nation / region | Towns with data | Monthly searches | Weighted CPC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Greater London | 38 | 90,860 | £10.24 |
| Wales | 5 | 34,470 | £5.64 |
| Scotland | 14 | 70,240 | £5.56 |
| England (rest) | 188 | 708,250 | £5.47 |
| Northern Ireland | 5 | 13,540 | £3.34 |
London's £10.24 volume-weighted average is 1.9x the England-outside-London figure of £5.47, and about 3x Northern Ireland's £3.34. The capital's density of competing firms, and the value of a London job, bids clicks up across every trade.
About those £100 clicks
You will see eye-watering figures quoted for emergency-trade keywords, and they are real DataForSEO readings. But almost every one sits on a keyword with a handful of searches a month, where Google's CPC estimate reflects a near-empty auction, and a single advertiser running "maximise clicks" with no budget cap is enough to set a headline price nobody sustainably pays. Here are the extremes, shown with the monthly search volume that should make you discount them:
| Keyword | Trade | Cost-per-click | Monthly searches |
|---|---|---|---|
| emergency plumber greenwich | Plumbing | £147.88 | ~70 |
| emergency plumber woolwich | Plumbing | £131.60 | ~10 |
| emergency plumber wood green | Plumbing | £124.49 | ~10 |
| emergency electrician twickenham | Electrical | £102.99 | ~20 |
| boiler repair edgware | Heating | £73.91 | ~10 |
| emergency roofer brighton | Roofing | £46.89 | ~20 |
A £147.88 click is unprofitable even at a 100% booking rate, no plumber pays that and survives. These figures say more about a broken keyword auction than about what tradespeople really spend. The robust national numbers are the medians: £4.48-£6.78 for a standard click and £11.62-£15.92 for an emergency one. Cite those, not the peaks.
What a click buys, and what it doesn't
The central point for any tradesperson reading this: a click is not a customer. Even at the robust median of around £6 a click, never mind the outliers. You are paying for one person tapping the ad, not a call, a booking or a paid job. A share of those clicks are misfires, comparison-shoppers and wrong numbers. That is the structural weakness of the pay-per-click model for emergency trades, and it is why competition on the highest-intent keywords has pushed some auctions to absurd levels.
A pay-per-job model inverts the risk: instead of paying for attention, the tradesperson pays a flat fee only once a customer has confirmed they chose them. The same 917,360 monthly searches represent the same demand, the difference is whether you buy it by the click or by the confirmed job.
Methodology & sources
Search & click-cost data: Google Ads monthly-average search volume and cost-per-click, retrieved via the DataForSEO Keywords Data API (geo: United Kingdom) and pulled on 17 June 2026. Trade totals sum the Google Ads monthly averages across the keyword variants queried per town, across 250 towns and cities. Volumes are a relative demand signal, not unique searchers.
How we handle click costs: Google Ads CPC on very-low-volume keywords is noisy, a single unconstrained bidder can push a near-empty auction to £100+ a click. To avoid presenting artefacts as market rates, per-trade and regional CPCs are reported as the median and the volume-weighted mean (each town's CPC weighted by its search volume), both of which down-weight thin outliers. The "£100 clicks" table is shown only to be flagged as unrepresentative, with each keyword's search volume.
Regional figures group each town by its stated region, aggregated to nation level with Greater London separated from the rest of England, and use the volume-weighted CPC.
The "modelled paid-search market" figures (monthly searches × volume-weighted CPC, per trade, summed) are illustrative. They estimate the ceiling of Google Ads spend if every search were served a paid click at the average price. They are not measured advertiser spend and should be cited as a modelled estimate. On GetTheCall, tradespeople pay nothing per click and a flat fee only once a customer confirms they chose them on the call.
Emergency trade callouts across the UK
GetTheCall routes homeowner emergency calls to tradespeople in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Sheffield, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Nottingham and Glasgow, plus 85+ other UK cities.