How Much Do Google Ads Cost? Bid Ranges and Budgets for Local Businesses

Every time someone searches on Google, Google Ads runs an auction to decide which ads show, in what order, and whether any ads show at all. The auction uses both your bid and the quality of your ad to set your position, so a competitor can bid more than you and still sit below you. You rarely pay your full maximum bid. Your actual cost per click is the minimum needed to hold your Ad Rank and any ad formats shown with your ad, such as sitelinks. Google lays this out in its guide to choosing a bid and budget.

Quality Score is the number you can see for ad quality. Google reports it on a 1 to 10 scale for each keyword, built from expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. It is an aggregated estimate and is not the figure used at auction time to set Ad Rank, but Google states that higher quality ads can lead to lower prices and better ad positions. See Google's guide to managing your spend.

For a starting price, the table below lists Google Keyword Planner's top-of-page bid ranges for nineteen common local trades, taken from our own Keyword Planner pull (US, November 2026). Each row shows the low and high ends of the range Keyword Planner reports for that trade. What you pay in your own market can land inside, below or above that range, depending on your ad quality, your location targeting and who else is bidding.

Work the budget out from the leads you need, not from a round number. You need three inputs: a planning cost per click from your trade's range, the number of leads you want each month, and your conversion rate, meaning the share of ad clicks that turn into a call or a form fill.

Divide the leads you want by your conversion rate to get the clicks you need. Multiply those clicks by your planning cost per click. That total is your monthly ad spend, the money that goes to Google. Divide it by 30.4, the average number of days in a month, to get the average daily budget you enter in the campaign. Google uses the same 30.4 figure in its average daily budget guide.

Expect daily spend to move around that average. Google may spend up to two times your average daily budget on a busy day and less on slow days. Across a billing period, it will not charge you more than 30.4 times your average daily budget.

Before you launch, compare your daily budget with a single click in your trade. If the average daily budget is smaller than one top-of-page bid from the table above, the campaign can afford very few clicks a day, and you will wait a long time for enough data to judge it.

Ad spend is paid to Google directly. Management is a separate fee for building, monitoring and adjusting the campaigns. If you want someone else to run that work, Rankure's Google Ads management costs $500 for the one-time setup, then $500 a month for ad spend up to $5,000. Above $5,000 in monthly ad spend, the fee is 10% of total monthly ad spend, so $8,000 in spend comes to an $800 management fee. The service is month-to-month, with no long-term contract.

Google has two planning tools inside Google Ads. Keyword Planner gives traffic estimates for keywords, including estimated clicks, estimated impressions and estimated average CPCs, and Google suggests using them to decide which bids and budgets to set. It is the source of the table on this page. Performance Planner helps you optimize budgets across campaigns you already run, according to Google's budget guide, so it becomes useful once you have campaign history.

Neither tool knows your conversion rate or how many jobs you need. The steps above add those two inputs. They turn a cost per click into a cost per lead, which you can compare with what a job is worth to you.