From 1 October, Google bills you for the calls nobody answers.
A Local Services Ads call during your listed hours that runs past twenty seconds is charged as a valid lead whether or not anyone picks it up. The fee is spent before your phone stops ringing. Here is the exact rule, what it costs by trade, and the one thing that genuinely reduces it.
Twenty seconds, answered or not.
Read this part carefully, because most of what gets written about it next month will get it wrong.
| Condition | Charged? |
|---|---|
| Call during your listed business hours, longer than twenty seconds, nobody answers | Yes, as a valid lead |
| Same call, but you answer it | Yes. Identical charge |
| Caller hangs up inside twenty seconds | No |
| Caller hangs up during your phone menu, before pressing a key | No. The timer starts at the keypress |
| Call outside your listed business hours | Not under this rule |
| Same customer calls again inside fifteen days | Charged once in that window |
Source: Search Engine Land, PPC Land and Search Engine Roundtable, late August 2026; the 15-day window confirmed by Google ads liaison Ginny Marvin.
Nothing you buy removes this charge.
Including ours. The fee is triggered by the call reaching twenty seconds, and no supplier sits between your caller and Google's timer.
The only thing that reduces what you are charged is listing fewer hours. That works, and it costs you the leads those hours would have brought. Everything else on the market changes what you get for the fee, not whether you pay it.
You are paying either way. The question is what you get.
Published cost per lead by trade. Work out your own number from your own call volume rather than taking a headline figure from anybody, us included.
| Trade | Cost per lead |
|---|---|
| Drain and sewer | $59 per lead |
| Plumbing | $57 per lead |
| HVAC | $51 per lead |
| Electrical | $39 per lead |
| Blended across all trades | $53 per lead |
Source: SearchLight Digital, $6.72M of spend across 888 contractors, February 2026. Roughly 27% of calls to home services businesses go unanswered, per Invoca platform data, calls to home services businesses. A human answering service runs $235 to $325 a month for fifty to a hundred calls; source: Published human answering service rates, $235 to $325 a month for 50 to 100 calls.
We cannot stop the fee. We can stop it buying nothing.
An assistant answers the call you have already been charged for, works from your own facts, and books the job while the caller is still on the line.
Source: fivestarguard rate card, assistant_metering.py:107 and assistant_metering.py:108. Overage assistant_metering.py:109.
Source: seo_billing.py:53, seo_billing.py:64, tiers at seo_billing.py:76-82. A page only earns its fee in a month when your own Search Console shows it reached position ten or better on at least one query and took at least one click.
Source: pricing.js:22 (domain_install), pricing.js:31 (league_season), pricing.js:43 (crm), pricing.js:52 (club_ops).
Answered straight.
No. The charge is triggered by the call lasting more than twenty seconds during your listed business hours, not by whether anybody picks it up. By the time your phone has rung out you have already paid. Answering does not remove the fee. It decides whether you got anything for it.
Listing narrower business hours. The rule applies to calls during the hours you publish, so publishing fewer hours means fewer chargeable calls. That is the only lever, and it is a real trade: the hours you remove are hours you stop getting leads in. Anyone selling you something that removes the charge itself is describing something that does not exist.
From 1 October 2026, a call to your Local Services Ads number during your listed business hours that lasts more than twenty seconds is charged as a valid lead, answered or not. If you run a phone menu, the twenty-second timer starts only once the caller presses a key, so somebody who hangs up during the menu is not charged.
Follow-up calls between you and the same customer can be billable if they meet the valid lead criteria. Google has confirmed you are charged once within a fifteen-day window for the same customer.
The named categories are plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control and moving, for advertisers in the United States.
Yes. It is being folded into Google Ads as a pay-per-lead campaign type, with the United States migration having begun in August 2026. The standalone dashboard is being retired and historical reports do not transfer, so export anything you need to keep before it goes.
It depends on your trade. Published cost per lead runs from $39 for electrical to $59 for drain and sewer, blended at $53. Roughly 27% of calls to home services businesses go unanswered. Multiply the two by your call volume and you have the size of the problem, using your own numbers rather than ours.
Every figure on it names its source and its date underneath. The one claim we are not making is the one you will see everywhere else next month, that some product removes the charge. It does not, and a supplier who tells you otherwise on a page like this will tell you worse things on an invoice.
Thirty minutes, and we tell you what we would build.
Or ring one of the six live lines first