Is Checkatrade worth it for a trade? Work it out from your own bill

In our view, Checkatrade is a fair way to fill a quiet diary while your own website isn't bringing in calls. As a long-term plan, it's renting your own customers: the day you stop paying, the enquiries stop. To see whether it's paying you now, divide three months of bills by the jobs it won you and compare that with what a job is worth to you, before you renew.

What Checkatrade is

Checkatrade is a website where homeowners look for a tradesperson and send them an enquiry. You pay a membership to be on it, and Checkatrade checks your business before it lists you. Your page on there is called your profile.

TrustATrader and Which? Trusted Traders work the same way, with a membership. MyBuilder, MyJobQuote and Bark work the other way round. They're free to list on, and you pay for each enquiry instead.

What it costs

When we looked on 10 September 2026, Checkatrade didn't put its prices on its sign-up page. What it did say: you pick how many leads you want a year, you pay monthly, and they check your ID, address and documents before any come through. The small print says: "Memberships are for 12 months." At the time, the first two months were free.

Why it's worth doing the sum

• The bill stays the same. The work doesn't. You pay the same every month, whether the enquiries turn into jobs or not.
• An enquiry can go to more than one firm. If it goes to five, you're in a race to the bottom on price with four others, to ring first and quote lowest. You ring back within the hour, and they've already booked someone who rang in ten minutes. So plan on winning one in five, and count jobs, not enquiries.
• AI tools read your profile. We tested what real UK trade answers from ChatGPT and similar tools were built from. Of 83 sources, 17 were trade directories, and 7 were Checkatrade. So the membership buys you a profile those tools read, as well as the enquiries.

How to tell if it's paying

1. Work out what a job is worth to you. Use your own figure. A boiler install is worth more than a tap repair. Not sure? Take the average of your last ten invoices.
2. Count the Checkatrade jobs you won in the last three months. Jobs, not enquiries. A job counts when it's booked, not when you've quoted for it. If you don't know which jobs came from where, start asking every new customer how they found you, and write it on the job sheet.
3. Add up three months of bills and divide by those jobs. That's what each Checkatrade job cost you. Why three months? Because one quiet month tells you nothing.
4. Put the two numbers side by side.

If each job cost you less than it was worth, Checkatrade's paying for itself. If not, it isn't.

Here's the sum with made-up round numbers. They aren't Checkatrade's prices, just numbers to show how it works. Say three months of bills came to £900, and you won six jobs from it. That's £150 a job. If your average job is worth £250, it's paying.

Before you sign, or renew, ask them

• What's the monthly price? Get it in writing.
• How many enquiries a year does that buy?
• How long is the contract, and what does it cost to leave early?
• Does an enquiry sent to me go to other trades too?
• What does the ID, address and documentation check need from me?
• Can I pause the enquiries when the diary's full?
• What happens to my profile and my reviews if I leave?
• Do the two free months come off the 12, or on top?
• How many other trades in my town do you list for the same job?

What to do this week

1. Fill in your profile on Yell and MyBuilder as well, even if you never pay for an enquiry on either. The AI tools read those too.
2. Use the same business name, phone number and address everywhere you're listed.
3. Ask customers for a review on those sites, not just on Google. In a 2026 survey of 47 local search experts, six of the top 25 things that decide an AI answer were reviews on sites other than Google.
4. If you need the work now, keep the membership while your own website pages get built. Cancel when the pages are bringing in the calls, not the week they go live. Pages take months to get found.

Why your own website is different

An enquiry from your own website isn't sold to anyone else. The customer might still ring round for quotes, but no other firm paid for that enquiry. And the page that brought it in is still there next month, with no new bill.

Where CitedBy fits

CitedBy, which publishes this guide, is software for UK trades. It writes pages for your own website and publishes them there, and any enquiry from those pages is texted to your phone. It doesn't buy or sell enquiries, and it won't sign you up to any site. It lists the trade sites the AI tools read, and checks whether you're listed on each one by searching for you. It costs £197 a month.

Questions

Are MyBuilder and Bark cheaper than Checkatrade? They charge a different way. They're free to list on, and you pay for each enquiry. The sum's the same, though: add up what you paid for enquiries over three months and divide by the jobs you won.

Is it worth it if my diary's already full? Do the sum for your busiest month and your quietest, and compare them. It can pay in the quiet months and lose you money in the busy ones.

See where your enquiries could come from

The free check reads your website and your Google listing for your job in your town. It takes about sixty seconds, and there's no card and no call.