What a Booked Inspection Should Cost You

By Luis Johnson, founder of Lunere Digital. Published October 29, 2026

There is no honest published cost per booked inspection for foundation work, and I went looking. It depends, and here is exactly what it depends on: your average signed job, the share of in-home appointments you close, your gross margin, and what an appointment costs you to attend. Those four numbers give you a ceiling, and the ceiling is yours rather than an industry figure.

The nearest public anchor is what it costs to get somebody to raise a hand at all. Home and home improvement search ads averaged $90.92 per lead at an 8.05 percent conversion rate, per LocaliQ's search advertising benchmarks, last updated 1 June 2026. An appointment somebody keeps costs more than a form fill, always, because most form fills never become one.

The short version

Your ceiling is the gross profit one attended appointment produces on average. Anything above it loses money however good the pitch sounds.
Gross profit per appointment is your average job times your close rate times your margin, minus the cost of sending the truck.
A booked appointment and a lead are not the same unit, so their prices cannot be compared side by side.
Set a floor as well as a ceiling: how many kept appointments a month cover your overhead.
When a vendor cannot say in writing what happens if the homeowner is not home, the price he quoted is not the price.

The ceiling on cost per booked inspection

Average your last twenty signed jobs. Then take the share of in-home appointments you sign, not the share of leads, because those two get mixed up constantly and the second one is always smaller. Multiply them and you have the revenue one attended appointment is worth on average. Multiply by your gross margin and you have the profit.

Then take off what the visit costs whether or not it closes: the estimator hour, the fuel, the truck, and the office time around booking it and reminding him. In most shops that is a real number and it is nearly always understated, because a salaried estimator feels free.

What is left is the most you can pay for one kept appointment and still be ahead. Write it down. Every pricing conversation after that gets short.

Setting your ceiling and your floor

Average signed job, last twenty (example input): $6,400
Close rate on attended in-home appointments (example input): 38 percent
Gross margin on that work (example input): 45 percent
Cost to attend one appointment (example input): $110
Monthly overhead to cover (example input): $42,000

$6,400 times 38 percent is $2,432 of revenue per attended appointment on average.
$2,432 times 45 percent is $1,094 of gross profit per attended appointment.
Take off the $110 it costs to send the truck and you are left with $984 per kept appointment.
That $984 is the absolute ceiling. Paying anything near it means you are working for nothing, so most shops set a working ceiling well under a quarter of it.
$42,000 of overhead divided by $984 is 43 kept appointments a month to break even before anything is paid for the appointments themselves.
Now drop the close rate to 28 percent and repeat. Profit per appointment falls to about $696 and the break-even count rises to 61 a month, which is a different business.

You end with two numbers you can defend in any conversation: the most you can pay for one kept appointment, and how many you need a month. The break-even calculator runs both and lets you drag the close rate until it hurts.

Your numbers, example inputs

What one booked inspection can cost you before it stops paying

Every value below is an example input. Nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing is saved.

Your average signed job

Your gross margin on that job

Bookings that actually happen

Inspections you close

Return you want on the money

Gross profit per signed job: $5,250
Inspections needed per signed job: 4.8
Most you can pay and still hit 5.0x: $221
Break-even cost per booked inspection: $1,103

Can you compare a lead price with an appointment price?

A lead is a person who typed something. An appointment is a time on a calendar with an address attached and a person who intends to be standing at it. Between those two sits the whole failure rate of this trade: the wrong numbers, the renters, the people who were curious at 11 at night and asleep on the idea by morning.

So when somebody shows you a lead price next to another vendor appointment price, he is putting a lottery ticket beside a seat. The only fair comparison is cost per signed job, because that is the same unit on both sides.

What to do with the number you just worked out

Your ceiling came out under about $150: Your average job or your margin is too small for bought appointments of any kind. Fix the ticket first, or buy nothing.
Your close rate in the home is under 25 percent: Appointments are not your constraint. Another one at any price goes into the same leaky process, so work the in-home pitch before you buy volume.
You already close well and your estimator has open days: Volume is your constraint, and a price per kept appointment is the one shape that grows without a retainer sitting under it.
A vendor quotes a price per appointment with no no-show policy: Ask for the policy in writing. An appointment nobody attends is a lead with a timestamp, and it should not be billed as more than that.

What I charge on, and what happens when it misses

I am paid per qualified inspection that actually happens. No retainer, nothing per lead, per call or per form fill. A no-show or a booking that was not qualified comes back to you, no questions asked, when you tell me inside 72 hours of the appointment, and when your own side caused the miss the charge stands.

If you do not get qualified inspections, I do not get paid. The guarantee on top of that reads: 10+ Booked Inspections Every Month. Or I Pay You Back. From day 90, every booking I am short of 10 in a month, you get $200 back. 8 booked means $400 back, up to everything you paid me that month. At $100 a day or more.

Is there an industry average I can compare myself against?

I could not verify one for residential foundation work in 2025 or 2026. The appointment setting figures that circulate are business-to-business and come from vendor pages, so they say nothing about a homeowner with a cracked wall. Compute your own ceiling instead, because it is the only number that applies to your shop.

Should I count no-shows in the cost?

Yes, unless they are refunded. Divide what you paid in a month by the appointments your estimator actually stood in, not by the ones that were scheduled. The gap between those two counts is the real quality score of whoever booked them.

My close rate is 60 percent. Does that change the ceiling?

It raises it a lot, which is why this is worth doing on your own books. Just check that the 60 percent is closes divided by attended appointments and not closes divided by jobs quoted, because quoting is itself a filter and it flatters the number.

Work out your ceiling first, then book the call and tell me what it came to. If my price does not fit under it, I will say so on the call.

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Sources

Search ads in the home and home improvement category averaged $90.92 per lead, $8.33 per click and an 8.05 percent conversion rate. LocaliQ, search advertising benchmarks.