Checkatrade Cost 2026: Membership Fees, What Members Really Pay, and the Price Per Lead

The published Checkatrade prices

Checkatrade's own pricing page, as recorded by third parties in July 2026, lists an Approved plan at £30 a month plus VAT and a set of lead-generating Growth plans from £59 a month. There is no joining fee. The Approved plan is essentially the vetted profile and badge; the Growth plans are where enquiries are supposed to come from, and their price depends on trade, area and the volume Checkatrade expects to send you.

That is where the published numbers stop. Checkatrade quotes the Growth plans individually, which is why two heating firms twenty miles apart can be paying very different amounts for what looks like the same membership.

What members actually pay

Every independent write-up lands in the same place: the headline plan prices are the floor, not the bill. Local Search North puts a typical active member at £60–£120 a month; Noble Leads, drawing on forum and review-site reports, puts most active memberships at £100–£300 a month and busy urban areas at £300–£500 or more. Individual bills quoted by tradespeople in 2024–2026 include £80, £129 plus VAT, £306, £442 and £500 a month.

The other pattern in the reports is the renewal. Several tradespeople describe year-two quotes 20–40% higher than year one, which is worth knowing before you sign anything with a twelve-month term. Diarise the renewal date the day you join.

None of this makes Checkatrade a bad deal on its own. It means the question "how much does Checkatrade cost?" has a range for an answer, and where you sit in the range depends on your trade, your postcode and how hard you negotiate.

What that works out at per lead

Noble Leads' per-lead estimates: £5–£15 for small jobs (a dripping tap, a single socket), £15–£25 for mid-size work (a bathroom repair, a boiler service), £25–£40 for larger projects (a boiler replacement, a bathroom refit, a rewire). An electrician quoted £150 a month for four leads is paying £37.50 a lead; a member on £129 plus VAT getting seven or eight leads is nearer £19.

Per lead is still the wrong number. A Checkatrade enquiry can reach several members, and you pay whether or not you win. If you contact half the leads, quote half of those and win a third of the quotes, a £25 lead becomes roughly £300 per won job before you have bought a fitting. The cost-per-booked-job maths is worked through here, with numbers you can swap for your own.

Two things the sales call will not raise

First, how many members already cover your trade in your area. Search your own town on Checkatrade as a homeowner and count. Being one of four profiles is a different product from being one of forty, at the same price.

Second, what happens to the enquiry after it arrives. Checkatrade's job ends when the homeowner sends a message. Answering it in the first minute, qualifying it and chasing the quote is yours, and it is the part that decides whether £300 a month is cheap or expensive. Firms that miss calls lose on every directory; firms that answer everything do fine on most of them.

Cheaper, dearer, or different?

TrustATrader sits in a similar band, around £600–£1,000 a year by tradespeople's reports. Rated People runs a subscription of roughly £35 a month plus VAT with lead credits on top; Bark sells credits at about £1.20–£1.80 each, with a lead costing £7–£40. The five-way directory comparison sets them side by side, and the Checkatrade alternatives round-up covers agencies and owned channels.

The different option is to stop paying for visibility or for names and pay for outcomes instead. MyTradeBuddy generates demand for one business per area, answers and qualifies every enquiry, chases it until it books or says no, and charges per booked survey. There is no monthly fee and no contract. It suits survey-led work (boilers, bathrooms, roofs, heat pumps) more than £80 call-outs, and one business per area means your patch may already be taken; pricing is here.

Frequently asked questions