UK Heating & Boiler Demand Report 2026: Searches & Clicks
Emergency heating demand across 245 UK towns, 103,710 monthly searches, the £73.91 boiler-repair click and winter no-heat risk. Free to cite.
- Heating and boiler work draws 103,710 Google searches a month across 245 UK towns and cities.
- Heating carries the highest typical click cost of the four trades, £6.78 (median), £8.11 volume-weighted, because boiler jobs are high-value and Gas Safe registration limits the field.
- Emergency boiler clicks run about 1.9x the standard rate (median £13.16). Individual figures read as high as £73.91 ("boiler repair edgware") but sit on about 10 searches a month, artefacts, not rates.
- Heating is the most weather-sensitive trade for timing: 86 of 239 risk-classified towns (36%) carry a hard-frost flag, and demand concentrates sharply in the winter cold snaps.
This is an open data report on emergency heating and boiler demand in the United Kingdom, compiled from live Google Ads search data, census figures and a per-town weather-risk classification. Every figure is sourced in the methodology below and is free to cite with attribution to GetTheCall.
The size of UK heating search demand
Heating generates the lowest raw volume of the four trades, 103,710 searches a month, but the highest typical click price, because a boiler breakdown in winter is a high-value, time-critical job and the Gas Safe requirement keeps the pool of eligible engineers small. Of that volume, 2,950 searches (2.8%) carry explicit emergency intent.
Where heating demand concentrates
Heating demand skews north and to colder cities. London leads, but Edinburgh and Glasgow punch above their population, and Worcester appears unusually high for its size.
| Town / city | Monthly heating searches | Avg CPC |
|---|---|---|
| London | 4,520 | £15.98 |
| Edinburgh | 4,040 | £10.42 |
| Glasgow | 2,800 | £4.93 |
| Worcester | 2,690 | £3.85 |
| Birmingham | 1,850 | £8.40 |
| Bristol | 1,790 | £9.47 |
| Sheffield | 1,690 | £5.79 |
| Leeds | 1,650 | £6.91 |
Where a boiler click costs the most
Restricting to keywords with real demand, 100+ searches a month, heating still produces some of the steepest volume-backed clicks in the dataset. The leaders are competitive London and South-East suburbs.
| Town / city | Top heating CPC | Monthly searches | Keyword |
|---|---|---|---|
| Croydon | £52.57 | 170 | boiler repair croydon |
| Enfield | £24.88 | 170 | boiler repair enfield |
| Chatham | £20.28 | 210 | boiler repair chatham |
| Bromley | £19.70 | 110 | boiler repair bromley |
| Rochester | £18.81 | 210 | boiler repair rochester |
| Gillingham | £17.66 | 720 | boiler repair gillingham |
The median emergency boiler click costs £13.16 against £6.78 for a standard heating click, a 1.9x premium, the narrowest gap of the four trades, because even routine boiler work already commands high prices. Ignore the extremes: "boiler repair edgware" reads £73.91 and "emergency boiler repair oxford" £42.98, but both keywords get only about 10 searches a month, near-empty auctions where one unconstrained bidder sets a price nobody sustainably pays.
The weather behind the callouts
No trade's timing is more weather-bound than heating. A boiler failure only becomes an emergency when it is cold, so demand is compressed into the winter cold snaps. Of the risk-classified towns, 86 (36%) carry a hard frosts flag and 27 (11.3%) an exposed high ground flag, the conditions that push ageing boilers into lockout and leave radiators cold. In Scotland, hard frost is the single most common flag, appearing in 12 of the classified Scottish towns.
What heating engineers actually charge
Emergency heating callouts typically run £85 to £200 for an out-of-hours diagnostic visit, with boiler repairs from £150 for minor component fixes to £1,500 or more for a full replacement. All gas-appliance work is a legal Gas Safe activity, unregistered gas work is a criminal offence, which is the structural reason heating click prices sit above every other trade.
Methodology & sources
Search & click-cost data: Google Ads monthly-average search volume and cost-per-click via the DataForSEO Keywords Data API (geo: United Kingdom), pulled 17 June 2026. Volumes sum the Google Ads monthly averages across the heating keyword variants queried per town; they 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 £70+ a click. So headline CPCs are reported as the median and the volume-weighted mean (both down-weight thin outliers), and "most expensive" tables are limited to keywords with 100+ searches a month. Extreme readings are shown only as labelled outliers, with their search volume.
Demographics: ONS Census 2021 (England & Wales), National Records of Scotland 2022, NISRA 2021 (Northern Ireland).
Weather-risk classification: GetTheCall's per-town local-conditions model across 11 hazard categories; 239 of 250 towns carry at least one flag.
The "modelled paid-search market" figure (monthly searches × volume-weighted CPC) is illustrative, not measured spend. On GetTheCall, heating engineers 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.