Published 2026 benchmarks put senior living cost per lead between $40 and $200, depending almost entirely on care type. Independent living sits at the bottom, memory care at the top.
If someone quotes you a single number for “senior living,” they are quoting an average of four different markets. Here is the useful version.
The ranges
| Care type | Cost per lead | Cost per move-in | Lead-to-move-in implied |
|---|---|---|---|
| Independent living | $40–120 | $1,800–3,200 | ~1 in 25 to 1 in 30 |
| Assisted living | $60–150 | $2,600–4,500 | ~1 in 30 to ~1 in 45 |
| CCRC / life plan | $70–180 | $2,400–4,000 | ~1 in 25 to ~1 in 35 |
| Memory care | $80–200 | $3,500–6,000 | ~1 in 30 to ~1 in 44 |
The third column is the one worth sitting with. It takes roughly 25 to 45 leads to produce one move-in across every care type. Not five. Not ten.
Most disappointment with senior living marketing comes from an unstated expectation of one in ten.
What is actually inside a “lead”
The word does more damage than any number in the table, because four different things get called one.
A form fill is someone who typed an email address. Cheapest, weakest, and the one most agencies report.
A phone call is worth several form fills. In senior living, the majority of high-intent contact is a phone call, which is why a community without call tracking is usually undercounting its best channel and defunding it.
A tour request is a lead with a date attached, and it is the first number that correlates with revenue.
A financially qualified enquiry is someone who can afford the rate. On a luxury AL/IL community in a competitive metro we have run these at $50, well under the benchmark range, because the targeting excluded people who were never going to move in.
An agency reporting a $22 cost per lead and an agency reporting a $95 cost per lead may be doing identical work and counting differently. Ask what is being counted before comparing anything.
Why a very low number is usually a warning
This is the part that costs operators the most.
A cost per lead far below the range for your care type has three common causes, and only one of them is good.
1. You are buying the wrong intent. Broad match keywords on senior living catch job seekers, students writing papers, vendors, and people researching for a parent three states away. All cheap. None of them move in.
2. You are counting form fills that never answer. A one-field form converts brilliantly and produces contacts who do not pick up. The cost per lead looks excellent right up to the cost per move-in.
3. You genuinely found efficiency. It happens. It looks like a low cost per lead and a low cost per move-in, together. If only the first number improved, it is one of the first two causes.
The test is simple: a real efficiency gain shows up in both columns. If cost per lead halved and cost per move-in did not move, you did not get cheaper. You got worse leads at a better price.
What moves the number, in order
- Care type. Dominates everything else. Memory care costs roughly twice independent living to fill.
- Market density. A metro with eight competing operators bidding on the same terms costs materially more than a market with two.
- Channel mix. Search costs more per lead and converts better; social costs less and converts worse (the Facebook versus Google trade-off). A blended figure moves when the mix moves, with no change in performance.
- Landing page conversion rate. The cheapest lever anyone has, and the least used. Doubling conversion halves cost per lead with no change in media spend.
- Response time. Not a cost-per-lead input, but the largest cost-per-move-in input there is.
How to use the benchmarks without being misled
- Compare against your own prior baseline first. The most defensible improvement we report is a 41% reduction in cost per lead against a community’s own previous performance, because it holds market, care type and mix constant. National comparisons do not.
- Compare to the range for your care type, never to a blended figure.
- Compare cost per move-in in the same breath. One number without the other is not evidence.
- Ask what counts as a lead before accepting any comparison, including ours.
The honest limits of this table
These are ranges from published benchmarks, not medians, and the spread inside each is wide enough to drive a strategy through. A $40 independent living lead and a $120 independent living lead are both “in range” and represent completely different operations.
They also do not account for your market. A memory care lead in a dense metro can exceed $200 without anything being wrong.
Use them to spot the number that is obviously out of place, not to grade a campaign to two decimal places. Our full method, and where it is weak, is published for the same reason.
If you want your own numbers checked against these, that is exactly what the free audit does, and you keep the readout either way.