What is the average Google Ads cost per click by industry in 2026?

According to LocaliQ and WordStream's 2026 Search Advertising Benchmarks report, Attorneys and Legal Services carries the highest average cost per click at $9.87, followed by Home and Home Improvement at $8.33, Dentists and Dental Services at $8.00, and Personal Services at $7.17. These categories combine real competition for the same searches with customers worth pursuing at a high price per click.

A middle band sits close to the $5.42 all-industries average: Health and Fitness at $6.17, Business Services and Industrial and Commercial both at $5.87, and Career and Employment at $5.81. Education and Instruction and Physicians and Surgeons sit just under that at $4.81 and $4.76.

At the lower end, Real Estate averages $3.22, Sports and Recreation $2.77, Automotive For Sale $2.27, Travel $2.14, Restaurants and Food $2.05, and Arts and Entertainment the lowest in the report at $1.63. Cheaper clicks in these categories generally reflect either less advertiser competition or a lower value per individual customer.

Cost per click and cost per lead answer different questions. Cost per click is what you pay for a visitor; cost per lead is what you pay for an actual enquiry, and the two are connected by conversion rate, the share of clicks that turn into a lead.

Business Services illustrates the gap clearly. Its $5.87 cost per click in the 2026 report sits close to the all-industries average, but its conversion rate is a below-average 4.85%, which pushes its cost per lead up to $93.69, well above the $66.69 all-industries figure. A category can pay a middling price per click and still end up with an expensive lead if fewer of those clicks convert.

Automotive Repair, Service and Parts shows the opposite pattern: a below-average $4.35 cost per click combined with a strong 15.51% conversion rate produces a $29.96 cost per lead, one of the cheapest in the entire report. Judging a category, or your own account, on cost per click alone misses half of what actually decides how expensive a lead ends up being.

The number of advertisers bidding on the same search terms is the single biggest driver of cost per click, since Google Ads runs on an auction. Categories where a closed customer is worth a large amount, legal cases, home renovations, dental implants, attract more advertisers willing to bid aggressively, which pushes the price of every click upward regardless of how well any single ad converts.

Quality Score also moves cost per click for an individual account within a category. A more relevant ad and landing page for a given search term earns a discount in the auction relative to a less relevant competitor bidding on the same term, so two businesses in the same category can see meaningfully different costs per click.

Seasonality and local market density matter too. A search term that spikes in demand during a specific season, or a service area with unusually many competing businesses, can push cost per click above a category's national average for weeks or months at a time before settling back down.