Median Google Ads cost per click across 6 service industries in the United States, paired with search volume, organic difficulty and search intent. Pulled from live keyword data, not from a survey and not from memory.
Two things this table is for. If you are buying clicks, it tells you whether the price you are paying is normal for your industry or a symptom of something broken. If you are deciding where to put budget, it tells you what a lead has to be worth before paid search makes sense at all.
The legal figures are the ones people misread. A truck accident attorney paying $509.15 per click is not being overcharged. A single case can be worth six figures, so the maths still works. The same click price in a business with a $400 average job would be ruinous. Cost per click means nothing without the value of what it buys.
Source. Live keyword data for the United States market, English language, pulled on 2026-09-15, and on 2026-08-15 for the August column. Cost per click is the average paid by advertisers, not a bid estimate.
Organic difficulty is a 0 to 100 score of how hard the term is to rank for without paying. It is a separate measure from advertiser competition, which is what most published benchmarks report and which says nothing about ranking.
Intent is classified as commercial, transactional, informational or navigational. It matters more than volume: a high volume term with navigational intent is people looking for a specific brand, not people looking to buy.
Limits. These are national medians. Costs in a dense metro run above them and rural markets below. Keywords with no reported volume were excluded rather than shown as zero. Two terms that appeared in the August edition, car accident lawyer and assisted living near me, returned no data this month after two attempts and were left out instead of being carried over. That is why some groups show fewer keywords than in August.
Reuse. These figures are free to cite or reproduce with attribution to Diwizi and a link to this page. There is no form and no email gate. See the citation line at the bottom of this page.
This is the second edition. The same 36 keywords were pulled again on 2026-09-15, one month after the first run, so the table below is a change measurement and not a snapshot. Nineteen of the 34 keywords with data got more expensive.
| Industry | Median CPC Sep | Median CPC Aug | Change | Keywords |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Legal | $98.55 | $101.84 | -3.2% | 5 |
| B2B & SaaS | $89.05 | $49.92 | +78.4% | 5 |
| HVAC & Plumbing | $33.75 | $31.50 | +7.1% | 8 |
| Home Services | $27.85 | $26.09 | +6.8% | 6 |
| Dental | $14.78 | $14.26 | +3.6% | 6 |
| Healthcare | $7.96 | $7.79 | +2.2% | 4 |
Read the B2B number carefully. That group moved 78% because a single term, marketing automation software, went from $49.92 to $89.05. With five keywords in the group, one term moving is enough to drag the median with it. The other four B2B terms fell. A median over a small group is a fragile number and this is what fragile looks like.
The clearest seasonal move is furnace repair, up 23.1% as the heating season approaches in the United States. Roof replacement rose 23.6% in the same window. These figures describe what advertisers paid, not why they paid it: nothing in this data set explains cause, and this page does not guess at one.
Median cost per click in this group: $98.55, against $101.84 in August (-3.2%). Highest: truck accident attorney at $509.15.
| Keyword | CPC Sep | CPC Aug | Change | Monthly searches | Organic difficulty | Intent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| truck accident attorney | $509.15 | $396.15 | +28.5% | 49,500 | 14 | Commercial |
| personal injury lawyer | $170.62 | $163.25 | +4.5% | 201,000 | 28 | Commercial |
| workers compensation lawyer | $98.55 | $101.84 | -3.2% | 135,000 | 8 | Informational |
| criminal defense attorney | $52.54 | $51.06 | +2.9% | 60,500 | 57 | Commercial |
| divorce lawyer | $29.53 | $30.25 | -2.4% | 246,000 | 32 | Commercial |
Median cost per click in this group: $89.05, against $49.92 in August (+78.4%). Highest: payroll software at $128.41.
| Keyword | CPC Sep | CPC Aug | Change | Monthly searches | Organic difficulty | Intent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| payroll software | $128.41 | $138.03 | -7.0% | 33,100 | 41 | Commercial |
| hr software | $91.59 | $115.39 | -20.6% | 9,900 | 17 | Commercial |
| marketing automation software | $89.05 | $49.92 | +78.4% | 1,900 | 48 | Commercial |
| project management software | $49.28 | $49.70 | -0.8% | 165,000 | 51 | Commercial |
| crm software | $38.64 | $43.98 | -12.1% | 165,000 | 59 | Commercial |
Median cost per click in this group: $33.75, against $31.50 in August (+7.1%). Highest: emergency plumber at $74.91.
| Keyword | CPC Sep | CPC Aug | Change | Monthly searches | Organic difficulty | Intent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| emergency plumber | $74.91 | $74.51 | +0.5% | 60,500 | 0 | Transactional |
| air conditioning repair | $46.46 | $43.74 | +6.2% | 368,000 | 0 | Commercial |
| plumber near me | $39.45 | $36.62 | +7.7% | 823,000 | 23 | Commercial |
| hvac repair | $34.77 | $32.44 | +7.2% | 74,000 | 39 | Commercial |
| water heater replacement | $32.72 | $30.57 | +7.0% | 49,500 | 30 | Transactional |
| furnace repair | $28.38 | $23.06 | +23.1% | 201,000 | 9 | Commercial |
| hvac installation | $22.23 | $23.56 | -5.6% | 22,200 | 14 | Commercial |
| drain cleaning | $13.92 | $15.02 | -7.3% | 110,000 | 0 | Commercial |
Median cost per click in this group: $27.85, against $26.09 in August (+6.8%). Highest: garage door repair at $52.75.
| Keyword | CPC Sep | CPC Aug | Change | Monthly searches | Organic difficulty | Intent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| garage door repair | $52.75 | $51.67 | +2.1% | 246,000 | 46 | Commercial |
| pest control near me | $32.48 | $31.51 | +3.1% | 165,000 | 40 | Commercial |
| roof replacement | $32.15 | $26.01 | +23.6% | 33,100 | 48 | Commercial |
| solar panel installation | $23.56 | $26.16 | -9.9% | 74,000 | 20 | Commercial |
| roofing contractor | $21.08 | $19.44 | +8.4% | 135,000 | 68 | Commercial |
| house cleaning services | $11.67 | $12.10 | -3.6% | 90,500 | 26 | Commercial |
Median cost per click in this group: $14.78, against $14.26 in August (+3.6%). Highest: dental implants at $26.49.
| Keyword | CPC Sep | CPC Aug | Change | Monthly searches | Organic difficulty | Intent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| dental implants | $26.49 | $23.37 | +13.4% | 165,000 | 44 | Transactional |
| all on 4 dental implants | $25.19 | $27.55 | -8.6% | 22,200 | 0 | Informational |
| cosmetic dentistry | $15.63 | $15.17 | +3.0% | 90,500 | 37 | Informational |
| dentist near me | $13.92 | $13.35 | +4.3% | 1,830,000 | 49 | Commercial |
| invisalign | $9.42 | $10.53 | -10.5% | 368,000 | 43 | Transactional |
| teeth whitening | $5.26 | $5.42 | -3.0% | 165,000 | 70 | Informational |
Median cost per click in this group: $7.96, against $7.79 in August (+2.2%). Highest: home care services at $13.51.
| Keyword | CPC Sep | CPC Aug | Change | Monthly searches | Organic difficulty | Intent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| home care services | $13.51 | $13.95 | -3.2% | 201,000 | 57 | Commercial |
| chiropractor near me | $9.55 | $9.51 | +0.4% | 673,000 | 9 | Commercial |
| medical spa | $6.37 | $6.07 | +4.9% | 135,000 | 35 | Commercial |
| urgent care near me | $3.59 | $3.88 | -7.5% | 4,090,000 | 19 | Commercial |
If your cost per click sits near the median for your industry, the account is priced normally and any problem you have is downstream: which searches you show for, where you show, and whether you can tell a lead from a booked job.
If it sits well above, three causes account for almost all of it. You are bidding on broader terms than you think, you are competing in a metro that carries a premium the national median hides, or your quality signals are weak enough that you pay more than competitors for the same position.
If it sits well below, that is not automatically good news. Cheap clicks in an expensive industry usually mean you are winning the searches nobody else wants.
For single advertisers rather than market medians, see the ad spend teardowns.
These numbers are free to use, quote, screenshot or rebuild, including commercially, as long as the figure is credited to the Paid Media Cost Index and links back to this page. No form, no email, no permission request. If you are a journalist, analyst or another agency and want a cut of the data that is not published here, write to hello [at] diwizi.com and say what you need.
Paid Media Cost Index, Diwizi, edition of 2026-09-15. Median Google Ads cost per click across six United States service industries. https://diwizi.com/paid-media-cost-index.html
The raw figures behind every table are also published in machine readable form in the structured data of this page, so a script or a language model can read them without scraping the HTML.
Two things are worth comparing these figures against, because a cost per click only means something next to what you pay to have the account run.
If you want that read done on your own account rather than estimated from a table, the audit is a fixed scope piece of work and the findings are yours either way.