Facebook Ads Statistics for Contractors (2026): Only What We Could Source

Every figure on this page comes from a named, published source, listed at the bottom with its sample and date. Where a number is our own arithmetic on those figures, we say so. Most "Facebook ads statistics" pages mix real benchmarks with numbers nobody can trace; an earlier version of this page did too, and we cut those rather than keep a round count.

From WordStream and LocalIQ's 2026 Facebook ads benchmarks for US lead campaigns.

• Home-improvement leads on Facebook cost about 57% more than the all-industry average ($42.95 against $27.39). That's our arithmetic on WordStream's figures.
• Clicks cost only about 21% more than average ($2.18 against $1.80), so most of the gap comes from a lower conversion rate, not pricier clicks. The landing page or lead form is where the difference is made.

From WordStream's Google Ads benchmarks, covering 13,474 US search campaigns from April 2025 to March 2026.

• A home-improvement lead from Google Search costs about 2.1 times one from Facebook ($90.92 against $42.95), on WordStream's figures.
• Google clicks in this category cost about 3.8 times Facebook clicks ($8.33 against $2.18), but convert better (8.05% against 5.32%), because the person is already searching.

• 71% of US adults say they use Facebook (Pew Research Center, survey of more than 5,000 adults, February to June 2025).
• 50% of US adults say they use Instagram (Pew Research Center, 2025).
• Instagram skews young: 80% of 18- to 29-year-olds use it, against 19% of those 65 and older (Pew Research Center, 2025). For trades whose buyers skew older, Facebook placements still matter.

• An ad set needs about 50 optimisation events (leads, if you optimise for leads) in a week to leave the learning phase, according to Meta's Business Help Center. At WordStream's $42.95 average, that's roughly $2,150 a week in one ad set, which is why most contractor ad sets stay 'Learning limited'. (Our arithmetic.)
• Meta's newer default attribution setting is 7-day click, 1-day engage-through and 1-day view, with only link clicks counted as clicks and likes, shares and saves moved to the engage-through window; check which setting your own ad sets use before comparing results over time.
• App Tracking Transparency arrived with iOS 14.5 in April 2021; iPhone apps, including Facebook and Instagram, must ask before tracking people across other apps and websites.
• In June 2025 Meta retired manual Aggregated Event Measurement setup: no more 8-event limit or event ranking, and domain verification is no longer required for event configuration.
• Since January 2025, US ads for financial products and services, including financing offers, must run in a special ad category: no ZIP-code targeting, a minimum 15-mile radius around any location, no age or gender targeting, and no lookalike audiences. Housing and employment ads have similar rules.
• Meta's definition of housing ads includes housing repairs, so ads for roofing, HVAC, plumbing, remodeling and other home-repair work can fall under the Housing special ad category, with the same limits: no age, gender or ZIP-code targeting, a 15-mile minimum radius and no lookalike audiences (Meta Business Help Center).
• Homeowner-status and home-value targeting are gone. Household-income targeting still exists in the US, but only as tiers of ZIP codes ranked by average income (top 5%, 10%, 10-25%, 25-50%), and it can't be used in the housing, employment or financial-products special ad categories.

• Companies that tried to contact a web lead within an hour were nearly 7 times as likely to qualify it as companies that waited even an hour longer, and more than 60 times as likely as those that waited 24 hours or more (Harvard Business Review, 2011).
• In a separate audit reported in the same article, the average first response from 2,241 US companies took 42 hours, and 23% never responded at all (Harvard Business Review, 2011). It's an old, cross-industry audit, not a contractor benchmark, but the pattern holds.
• Calling within 5 minutes rather than 30 made reaching a lead 100 times more likely and qualifying it 21 times more likely (MIT and InsideSales.com, 2007).

• That responding within one minute increases conversions by 391%. Widely repeated, with no accessible original methodology.
• That 78% of customers buy from the first company to respond. We couldn't find a study, sample or method behind it.
• Precise ROAS tiers for contractors ("top quartile hits 5-8x"). No published study of contractor ROAS we could find supports a specific figure.
• Percentage lifts from homeowner targeting, which Meta removed, or from income targeting, which only ranks ZIP codes by average income rather than identifying affluent households.

For what these benchmarks mean for your trade, see our industry pages; to turn them into a budget, try the Meta Ads ROI calculator.