Contractor Financing Costs 3.9% to 9.9% Per Job. We Ran the Break-Even Math on Whether It Pays.

There are exactly two numbers you need to decide whether to offer customer financing. What it lifts your close rate by, and what it costs you per job. Every guide we could find publishes the first one. Almost none of them publish the second, which means the reader is handed half an equation and told it adds up.

So we went and got both halves, and then did the arithmetic.

The short version is probably not what you expect from an agency writing about a product it does not sell. At realistic uptake, financing pays, and it pays with room to spare. The break even bar is far lower than the fees make it look. But there is one specific configuration where the math turns against you, it is the configuration most aggressively promoted, and almost nobody checks for it.

One disclosure before the numbers, because it changes how you should read this. We do not sell financing, we take no referral fee from any lender, and we have no product in this category. We build the websites and run the ad accounts where these offers get presented, which is the only reason we care how well they work.

What Financing Actually Costs You Per Job

Getting a straight answer on fees is harder than it should be. Most lenders in this space quote the merchant rate privately during onboarding, which is why the comparison blogs are full of ranges rather than numbers.

Wisetack is the exception, and publishes its full fee schedule openly, so that is what we will use. Their published pricing table looks like this.

In their own words: "You only pay a higher fee when your customer qualifies for and selects a 0% APR option for 6, 12, or 24 months. For all other options, the fee you pay is 3.9%."

This is the part that gets lost when a fee is expressed as a percentage. On a $12,000 job, that 3.9 percent is $468, and the 24 month 0 percent option is $1,188. On a $25,000 job the same two options cost you $975 and $2,475. That is not a rounding error on a rooftop. That is a crew day.

And notice which direction the pricing runs. The offer your customer most wants to hear is the one that costs you the most to give them. Nobody is hiding this, but it does mean the tier that is easiest to sell with is the tier that quietly does the most damage to a thin margin.

The Break-Even Math, and the Part Every Guide Leaves Out

Here is the mechanism that almost no article on this subject writes down.

You pay the dealer fee on every financed job, including the jobs you would have closed anyway at full price. The fee is not a commission on incremental business. It is a levy on all financed business. Your gain is the margin on the extra jobs financing won you. Your cost is the fee on every job that runs through it, won or would have been won regardless.

Which gives a clean break even condition. If c is your close rate with financing, b is your close rate without it, m is your gross margin and f is the share of jobs that actually finance, then financing pays when the extra margin beats the fees:

Break even lift, in percentage points = c × f × r ÷ m

Now we need real values. For the lift, the best available evidence is not from a lender. The Air Conditioning Contractors of America ran its Contractor of the Future study with Farmington Consulting Group across more than 1,000 contractors. Contractors offering financing reported a 49 percent close rate. Those not offering it reported 38 percent. That is a gap of 11 percentage points.

Worth pausing on the units, because a lot of pages get this wrong. Going from 38 to 49 is 11 percentage points, which is a 29 percent relative improvement. Several of the top ranking pages on this topic describe it as "11% more", which is a different and smaller claim. If you are comparing sources, check which one they mean.

The same study gives us the uptake figure, which turns out to be the variable that decides everything: 21 percent of sales get financed when the contractor leads with the total price, rising to 42 percent when they lead with the monthly payment.

Put it together at a 30 percent gross margin. Each cell is the close rate lift, in percentage points, you would need just to break even on the fees.

Compare every one of those numbers to the 11 point lift the ACCA study actually measured. At realistic uptake the bar is between 1.3 and 6.8 points, and the measured lift is 11. Financing is not a close call. On these inputs it clears its own cost several times over.

There is a second way it pays that this table ignores entirely. If financing raises your average ticket rather than your close rate, it can carry itself on that alone. At a 30 percent margin, a 3.9 percent fee pays for itself on a 14.9 percent bigger average job, and the 6.9 percent tier needs 29.9 percent. Both vendors who publish a ticket figure claim to clear the first bar comfortably.

Why the 11 Point Lift Is Weaker Evidence Than It Looks

We just built a fairly confident conclusion on one number, so it is only fair to tell you how much weight that number can hold. Less than you would like.

It is a correlation, not a proven cause. This is a survey of what contractors report. Businesses that offer financing are plausibly different from businesses that do not in a dozen other ways: they tend to be larger, to have an actual sales process, to train their people, to follow up properly. Any of that could produce a chunk of an 11 point gap on its own. The honest statement is that contractors who offer financing close more jobs, not that financing caused all of it. If we told you otherwise we would be doing the same thing we complain about when a vendor does it.

It is HVACR data. ACCA surveyed heating and cooling contractors. We have applied it to roofing and general contracting, which is an extrapolation. Emergency replacement work and planned project work do not behave the same way at the kitchen table, and a furnace dying in January is a different sale from a roof someone has been putting off for three years.

The vendor numbers are vendor numbers, and at least one says so. Wisetack claims financing increases conversion by 20 percent and average ticket by 26 percent. To their credit, the footnote on their own page reads "Based off internal Wisetack merchant data, 2025", which is a more honest disclosure than most. Synchrony's study, reporting a 12 percent close rate lift and 13 percent larger tickets, was produced with ServiceTitan and Visa, and Synchrony is a lender. None of these are fabricated. They are just all produced by people who benefit if you believe them, and they should carry less weight than the trade association number.

The reason we still land on "offer it" is not that any single source is strong. It is that the break even bar at realistic uptake is so low that even the most conservative lift estimate clears it. That is a more robust conclusion than one that depends on the 11 being exactly right. This is the same reason we published the honest math on database reactivation: a conclusion that survives a bad input is worth more than a precise one that does not.

The One Place the Math Turns Against You

Run the model backwards and ask a different question. At what uptake does each tier stop paying, assuming the full 11 point lift and a 30 percent margin?

The 3.9 and 4.9 percent tiers never stop paying, even if every single job you sell runs through financing. The 12 month tier at 6.9 percent breaks even only if 97.6 percent of jobs finance, which no real business hits.

The 24 month 0 percent tier at 9.9 percent flips at 68 percent uptake. And that one is reachable. A sales team that leads with the monthly payment on every quote is already at 42 percent by ACCA's own measurement. Push a long interest free promotion hard in your advertising, put it in the headline, train everyone to open with it, and 68 percent is not an abstract ceiling. It is a Tuesday.

Margin makes this sharper. Everything above assumes 30 percent gross margin. Hold the 6.9 percent tier and full uptake, and the break even bar moves to 9.7 points at a 35 percent margin, 13.5 points at 25 percent, and 16.9 points at 20 percent. Below about a 25 percent gross margin, the expensive tiers stop being defensible on the evidence available. If you do not know your gross margin to within a couple of points, that is the thing to go fix before you pick a financing plan.

So the trap is specific and avoidable: the longest interest free promotion, pushed hard enough that most of your work flows through it, on a business with thin margins. Every other combination on this page is fine.

What to Ask Before You Sign, Especially in Canada

You cannot run any of the arithmetic above without your own fee schedule, and that is exactly the number most lenders do not publish.

This is worse north of the border. Wisetack, whose table we used, is United States only. In Canada the market consolidated: Financeit acquired Snap Home Finance, Simply Group and Ecohome Financial, and Snap became part of Financeit in 2021. Financeit does not publish dealer fees on its marketing site. They are quoted per merchant account during onboarding. So a contractor in Vernon or Kelowna genuinely cannot look up what this article is about.

Which makes the ask simple. Before you sign anything, get in writing:

The fee for every tier, not just the headline one. You want the whole table, the way Wisetack publishes it, because your customers will choose across it and your blended cost depends on the mix, not on the cheapest row.

What happens when the customer does not qualify for the promotional rate. The fallback product has its own fee and its own APR, and that is what most of your customers will actually be offered.

Whether you can turn a tier off. The ability to withdraw the 24 month option, or reserve it for jobs over a certain size, is the single control that keeps you out of the one trap on this page.

Your real uptake after 90 days. Not the projection. The share of your closed jobs that financed, which you can only get by looking. It is the variable the entire model is most sensitive to.

Where to Put the Offer So It Earns Its Fee

A financing offer that nobody sees until the estimate is handed over is paying full freight for a fraction of its value. The ACCA finding that uptake doubles from 21 to 42 percent purely on whether you lead with the monthly payment is, read another way, a finding about presentation.

That applies well before the kitchen table. If your ads and your landing page still lead with a total price, or with nothing at all, you are filtering out the homeowners the offer exists to reach. We wrote about the general version of this problem in whether to put prices on your website, and about the pages that collect traffic without collecting work in why contractor sites get traffic but no leads.

Three placements do most of the work. On the service pages where somebody is deciding whether you are affordable. In the ad copy, where a monthly figure competes against competitors quoting nothing. And in the follow up sequence, because a quote that stalled on price is the single most qualified audience for a payment option that you already have contact details for.

The fee is fixed the moment your customer picks a tier. How many people saw the offer early enough for it to change their decision is entirely up to you, and that is the half of this equation you actually control.

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