Written by Tarun Kapoor, Founder — Ex-media buyer for personal-injury and mass-tort firms. Founder of Mass Tort Marketing Agency. Pricing last revised 2026-07-27.
What you are actually buying
“MVA leads” describes four different products that share a name and almost nothing else. The price gap between the cheapest and the most expensive is roughly a hundred-fold, and most disappointing buying experiences trace back to a firm buying one tier while budgeting, staffing, and forecasting for another.
| Tier | Typical price | What arrives | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aged / shared web lead | $30–$120 | A form fill resold to three to eight firms, often days or weeks old. | High-volume outbound shops with a dialer and thick skin. Rarely works for a solo attorney. |
| Exclusive real-time web lead | $585–$1,105 | A single firm receives the inquiry within seconds of consent capture. | The default for firms that answer the phone fast. This is what our pricing tables below describe. |
| Live transfer / pay-per-call | $80–$250 per qualified call | The prospect is screened by a call centre and warm-transferred to your intake desk. | Firms with staffed phones in business hours who would rather buy conversations than contact records. |
| Signed retainer | $1,500–$20,000+ per case | The case arrives already signed; you buy the retainer, not the inquiry. Also sold as pre-signed cases or pay-per-signed-case. | Firms with capital who want caseload without building an intake function. Highest cost, lowest control over case quality. |
We sell the second tier only: exclusive, real-time, one firm per lead. Everything priced below in this guide refers to that tier unless the table says otherwise.
The fourth tier is a different product rather than a premium version of the first three — pre-signed cases remove the conversion step and charge you for it, which is only worth doing below a certain intake sign rate. The crossover is worked out on cost per signed case.
Where the supply actually comes from
Ask any vendor how they generate leads before you ask what they cost. The channel determines the intent level, and intent determines whether the price is reasonable. There are five common sources, and they are not equivalent:
- Paid search. Someone typing “car accident lawyer near me” into Google. The highest-intent source and the most expensive to generate — competitive personal injury clicks run well past $100 apiece in major metros, which is precisely the arbitrage lead vendors live inside.
- Paid social. Interruption traffic from Meta and TikTok. Cheaper per click, lower intent, and it needs harder qualification. Good vendors screen it before delivery; poor ones pass the raw form fill straight through.
- Organic and content. Slow to build, excellent intent, rarely available at volume from a vendor because the vendor would usually rather keep it.
- TV, radio, and out-of-home. Broad reach, strong for brand recall, and typically routed as inbound calls rather than form fills.
- Co-registration and incentivised paths. Someone entered a sweepstake or a survey and a checkbox opted them into attorney contact. Cheapest supply, worst consent posture, highest complaint risk. Avoid it.
A vendor that will not tell you its channel mix is usually buying from somewhere it would rather not name. That is not always disqualifying, but it should change the price you are willing to pay and the credit terms you insist on.
What makes an MVA lead qualified
“Qualified” is the most abused word in this market, because every vendor uses it and almost none define it in the contract. Define it yourself, in writing, before the first lead is delivered. What each filter means in practice — and what tightening it does to your price and volume — is broken down on not-at-fault, injured, unrepresented. The five criteria worth insisting on:
- Injury present. Property damage alone is not a personal injury case. Ask whether the person sought medical treatment and when.
- Fault sits with the other party. This interacts with state law more than most buyers expect — a claimant 55% at fault recovers nothing in a modified comparative negligence state and recovers something in a pure comparative one.
- Not already represented. The single most common reason a delivered lead is worthless. It should be an explicit screening question, not an assumption.
- Inside the statute of limitations. Two years in most of the markets we cover, three in New York. An accident from thirty months ago in Georgia is not a case, however good the contact details are.
- Jurisdiction match. The accident, the claimant, and your bar admission need to line up. Cross-border metros — Cincinnati into northern Kentucky, NYC into New Jersey — are where this quietly goes wrong.
Tighter screening costs more per lead and produces fewer of them. That is the correct trade in almost every case, because the expensive resource is your intake desk’s attention, not the lead itself. More on the distinction in what makes a lead exclusive and qualified.
What MVA leads cost in 2026
The table below is generated from the MVA Lead Cost Report 2026, which publishes its methodology, sample basis, and a machine-readable JSON endpoint. Shared CPL rises with case rarity; exclusive CPL is flat per market, so commercial truck and wrongful death cost the same per lead as standard auto but sign less often, which pushes cost per signed case up. They are still usually the better buy, because the average fee on the back end rises faster than the cost per signed case.
| Case type | Shared CPL | Exclusive CPL | Signed rate | Cost / signed case |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard auto | $40–$90 | $585–$1,105 | 10–15% | $3,900–$11,050 |
| Motorcycle | $60–$120 | $585–$1,105 | 9–14% | $4,200–$12,300 |
| Pedestrian | $80–$150 | $585–$1,105 | 8–13% | $4,500–$13,800 |
| Commercial truck | $120–$300 | $585–$1,105 | 6–11% | $5,300–$18,400 |
| Wrongful death | $200–$500 | $585–$1,105 | 5–9% | $6,500–$22,100+ |
Exclusive CPL by market
State-level variation comes from three sources: paid-search cost density in the metro, bilingual supply (Spanish-language intake prices roughly 20% higher and converts better where it is needed), and statute-of-limitations urgency. We run campaigns in all 50 states; the markets below are the ones we publish a per-state figure for, and each sits inside the national band — Florida is currently the floor at $585, Los Angeles the ceiling at $1,105.
| Market | Exclusive CPL | Intake language |
|---|---|---|
| California | $845 | English + Spanish |
| Texas | $748 | English + Spanish |
| Florida | $585 | English + Spanish |
| New York | $715 | English |
| Oregon | $585 | English |
| Los Angeles | $1,105 | English + Spanish |
| Houston | $748 | English + Spanish |
| Arizona | $1,040 | English + Spanish |
| New Jersey | $585 | English + Spanish |
| Ohio | $585 | English |
| Pennsylvania | $585 | English |
| Illinois | $780 | English + Spanish |
| Georgia | $1,040 | English |
| Massachusetts | $585 | English + Spanish |
Cost per signed case — the only number that matters
Cost per lead is the number vendors advertise. Cost per signed case is the number that decides whether buying leads is profitable for your firm. The arithmetic is simple and worth doing before every renewal:
Worked example — 100 exclusive leads in Florida.
100 leads × $585 CPL = $58,500 spend
100 leads × 82% contact rate = 82 conversations
82 conversations × 15% signed rate = 12 signed cases
$58,500 ÷ 12 = $4,875 cost per signed case
At an average net fee of $12,000–$20,000 on standard auto, that is a 2.5×–4.1× return before overhead. In a market priced at the top of the rate card the same math needs a higher sign rate to clear the same bar.
Two things break this math in practice. The first is intake latency: contact rate falls off a cliff after five minutes, and a 60% contact rate instead of 82% turns that $4,875 into $6,500 without the lead quality changing at all. The second is pausing mid-month — supply signal stabilises around weeks three to six, so a firm that stops and restarts every fortnight is permanently buying the worst part of the curve. Our Tampa intake case study walks through a firm that moved its signed-case rate from 6% to 14% without changing lead source.
Speed to lead is the cheapest lever you have
Of everything on this page, response time is the variable most under your control and the one firms most consistently underinvest in. A lead you call in ninety seconds and a lead you call in ninety minutes are, for pricing purposes, different products — and you paid the same for both.
The mechanism is not mysterious. Someone injured in a crash who has just submitted a form is, in that moment, actively looking for representation. Within an hour they have often called two more firms or spoken to an insurance adjuster. Exclusivity protects you from competing lead buyers; it does not protect you from the claimant’s own shopping behaviour or from an adjuster reaching them first.
- Under 5 minutes. Contact rates in the 75–90% range on exclusive supply. This is the number our pricing math assumes.
- 5–60 minutes. Contact rate degrades steadily. Still workable, and where most firms actually operate.
- Over an hour. Contact rate falls far enough that the effective cost per signed case can double without lead quality changing at all.
- Next business day. You are now buying aged leads at exclusive prices.
Practical fixes that cost less than switching vendors: route leads to a mobile-reachable person rather than a shared inbox, set an after-hours path before you turn supply on, and fire an automated SMS within thirty seconds acknowledging the enquiry by name so the claimant knows a real firm has it. Firms that get this right sign at roughly double the rate of firms that do not, from identical supply — which is the finding behind our Tampa intake case study.
Work out your own volume and budget
Rather than reading our ranges and estimating, put your own numbers in. Work backward from the cases you can service, not forward from a budget figure — the arithmetic is shown so you can check it.
How many MVA leads do you need — and what will they cost?
Work backward from signed cases, not forward from cost per lead. Set your target and your real intake conversion rate; the arithmetic is shown below so you can check it.
Only count cases your firm can actually service.
Price is flat per market and does not vary by case type — $585–$1,105 depending on the state.
Signed cases ÷ leads delivered. Exclusive supply with fast intake typically lands at 10–15%.
Use fees actually collected, not projected settlement values.
- Leads needed per month
- 84 leads
- Monthly lead budget
- $49,140
- Cost per signed case
- $4,875
- Gross fees at that volume
- $150,000
- Return on lead spend
- 3.1×
- Lead spend as % of fees
- 33%
At $4,875 per signed case against a $15,000 average fee, acquisition is consuming 33% of gross fees — inside the range most profitable PI firms run.
We will tell you the real CPL in your state and whether the volume you just modelled is actually available.
The full break-even model, including the four situations where purchased supply loses money, is on are MVA leads worth it. Already holding a vendor’s quote? Run it through the MVA lead cost calculator to see where it sits in your state’s range.
Exclusive, shared, live transfer, or aged
The headline price ranks these in exactly the opposite order to the cost per signed case. Shared supply looks four to ten times cheaper and usually is not, because every firm that bought the same record calls the same person inside ninety seconds.
| Supply model | CPL | Contact rate | Signed rate | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Exclusive real-time | $585–$1,105 | 75–90% | 10–15% | One firm per lead, never resold |
| Shared / multi-sold | $30–$120 | 25–35% | 3–6% | Sold to 3–8 firms simultaneously |
| Live transfer | $80–$250 / call | ~100% | 8–14% | Pre-screened, but business hours only |
| Aged (30–90 days) | $15–$60 | 10–20% | 1–3% | Most are already represented |
Some vendors also sell “limited-share” leads, capped at a small number of buyers. Economically they behave like shared supply: whichever firm dials first still wins the case. Aged supply is the far end of the same curve — the record is cheap because most of the claimants it describes have already hired someone, which is worked through on aged MVA leads.
The full breakdown, including when shared supply genuinely is the right call, is on exclusive vs. shared MVA leads.
The five-step buying checklist
01. Define case types and states. Decide which case types you actually want to sign — standard auto, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, wrongful death — and which states you’re licensed and capable of operating in.
02. Set an honest monthly budget. Tie your spend to your intake bandwidth. A solo attorney typically starts at $3K–$10K/month; small firms run $10K–$30K; mid firms $30K–$100K+.
03. Lock in a fixed cost per lead. Agree CPL up front. Reject any vendor that uses media spend, retainers, or volume-based variable pricing — the unit economics get muddy fast.
04. Integrate real-time delivery. Webhook into your CRM (Litify, Filevine, Lawmatics, CASEpeer, etc.) or accept warm-transfer calls. Speed-to-lead under five minutes is non-negotiable.
05. Review weekly, scale monthly. Track contact rate, qualified rate, signed-case rate. Don’t pause and restart inside a 30-day window — signal stabilises around weeks 3–6.
What to ask any vendor before signing
- How exactly do you generate the leads (channel mix)?
- Is each lead sold to one firm or shared — and is that in the contract?
- Average delivery time from consent to webhook?
- What’s your written return, credit, or replacement policy for unqualified leads?
- Can I start with a single state for the first 30 days?
- Will you publish per-state CPL benchmarks?
- Who owns the consent record, and can you produce it on demand?
- What happens to leads I reject — are they resold?
The consent question matters most: our TCPA compliance guide for lead buyers covers the five consent artifacts every lead must carry and seven vendor audit questions in full. The expanded version of this list — twelve questions, each with the answer that should reassure you and the answer that should end the conversation — is at 12 questions to ask any MVA lead vendor. Whether the arrangement itself is permissible under your state's professional conduct rules is covered in bar rules for buying MVA leads.
Where can I buy car accident leads?
Car accident leads are bought from legal lead-generation vendors that run accident-intent campaigns and sell the resulting inquiries — per lead, per inbound call, or per signed retainer. Supply is bought either direct from the firm that generates it or resold through aggregators and networks. What separates vendors is how exclusivity is defined in the contract and what consent record ships with each lead.
- Three ways to buy. Per lead — the pay-per-lead model ($585–$1,105 exclusive, $30–$120 shared) — per inbound call ($80–$250 qualified, the model behind pay-per-call MVA leads), or per signed retainer. The unit you buy determines who carries the intake risk. Whether a vendor calls itself a PI lead generation company or lists personal injury leads for sale by the batch, it is selling one of these three units.
- Direct generator or reseller. A vendor that runs its own ad accounts can name the domains its traffic comes from. An aggregator reselling network supply usually cannot — ask before the first invoice, not after.
- Who else sells this supply. On Point Legal Leads publishes personal injury leads for sale across multiple claim types, with a stated focus on live-transfer auto accident leads and signed motor vehicle accident retainers. Quintessa Marketing markets vetted MVA leads to personal injury firms covering personal vehicle, bicycle, motorcycle, and pedestrian accident cases. PinPoint Legal Marketing states its auto accident leads are generated nationwide, pre-qualified, exclusive, and matched to the buying firm's area. Each claim is taken from that vendor’s own public page and last checked 2026-08-04.
The two questions that actually separate them are how exclusivity is defined in the contract and what consent artifact ships with each record — both covered in what to ask an MVA lead vendor.
Do you sell medical malpractice or other case-type leads?
We supply motor vehicle accident leads only: standard auto, motorcycle, pedestrian and bicycle, rideshare, commercial truck, and vehicle-related wrongful death. We do not sell medical malpractice, mass tort, workers' compensation, premises liability, or slip-and-fall leads. Firms needing those case types should buy from a vendor that generates them directly rather than through a reseller.
- Supplied: standard auto, motorcycle, pedestrian and bicycle, rideshare, commercial truck, and vehicle-related wrongful death.
- Not supplied: medical malpractice, mass tort, workers’ compensation, premises liability, slip-and-fall, and nursing-home cases.
- Why the line is drawn there. The campaigns, consent language, and qualification criteria for those case types are different enough that running them well requires separate ad infrastructure — reselling them would make us the kind of aggregator the section above tells you to avoid.
How the main MVA lead vendors compare
Below is what each vendor publishes about its own pricing and methodology, taken from their public websites and last re-checked 2026-07-13. Where a company does not publish something, the table says so rather than guessing.
| Vendor | Published pricing | Published methodology |
|---|---|---|
| MVA Leads (us) | Full case-type and per-state tables ($585–$1,105 exclusive), plus a machine-readable dataset | Yes — methodology, sample basis, and JSON endpoint |
| Kurios | Illustrative range published ($315–$350/lead at 50 leads/mo); exact price quoted per state and volume | Not published |
| Legal Brand Marketing | Not published — 'How much do leads cost?' section directs buyers to contact them | Not published (cites National Safety Council accident statistics) |
| OnPoint Legal Leads | Not published — quoted by geography and volume via contact form | Not published |
| BrokerCalls | Not published — per-call fee quoted on contact | Not published |
| Legenex | Not published | Not published |
| Exclusive Leads Agency | Tier ranges published: $200–$400 raw web leads, $250–$700 qualified exclusive, $400–$800 live transfer, signed retainers from $2,500 | Not published |
| Legal Leads Group | Not published — month-to-month campaigns and pay-per-signed-case options quoted on contact | Not published |
| Claim Supply | 50-state exclusive-lead cost table published publicly, banded Budget through Premium ($150–$550) | Pricing tables published with cited crash and settlement sources; no methodology document or dataset published |
| PinPoint Legal Marketing | Publishes an exclusive MVA range of $175–$275, noting variation by market and lead source | Not published |
| WEBRIS | Not published | Not published |
Full head-to-head breakdowns, including what each vendor genuinely does better than us, are on best MVA lead companies compared.
Consent and TCPA — what a compliant lead carries
A purchased lead is only as defensible as its consent record. If a vendor cannot produce those artifacts for any lead on request, you are carrying their compliance risk on your own letterhead. Advertising rules sit on top of consent: in California, for instance, SB 37 now lets any person sue uncertified referral operations, which is set out in California SB 37 and buying MVA leads.
This matters more since the regulatory picture shifted in 2025, and it is the one area where the cheapest supply is most often the most expensive. Read the full TCPA compliance guide before signing with anyone, including us.
When you should not buy MVA leads
We sell leads, so treat this section with appropriate scepticism — and then read it anyway, because a firm that buys supply it cannot convert churns in sixty days and tells everyone the product does not work. There are four situations where buying is the wrong move:
- Nobody can answer the phone inside five minutes. If your intake is a shared inbox checked twice a day, fix that first. Every dollar of lead spend is leveraged by response time, and negative leverage is still leverage. The operational bar — response time, attempt cadence, coverage hours, and how many leads one specialist can absorb — is set out in intake requirements before you buy MVA leads.
- Your budget is under roughly $3,000 a month. Below that you cannot buy enough volume to distinguish signal from noise. Ten leads that produce one signed case tell you almost nothing — that outcome is consistent with a 5% sign rate and a 20% one.
- You need cases this week. Supply signal stabilises around weeks three to six. Buying leads is a pipeline decision, not a cash-flow rescue.
- You already have a working owned channel with headroom. If your own paid search is producing cases at a lower cost per signed case and you have not yet saturated the impression share, spend there first. Purchased supply is best as a complement to an owned channel or as a way into markets where you have no presence — not as a replacement for advertising you could profitably scale yourself. We set out both sides of this in PPC versus buying MVA leads and, for paid social, buying leads versus running your own Facebook ads.
The cheapest way to get car accident cases
For a new personal injury firm, the cheapest signed car accident cases usually come from channels it already owns — referrals, past clients, a Google Business Profile — but those take months to build. Shared leads are cheapest per lead and can look cheapest per case on paper, but only if your intake can work several times the volume and win the race to dial. If your intake can answer inside five minutes today, a capped pilot of exclusive leads in one state, judged on cost per signed case, finds your real number fastest.
The honest summary: purchased leads buy you speed and geographic reach without building a marketing function. They do not buy you an intake function, and they are not cheaper than a mature owned channel. Firms for whom this works best are those with intake capacity that exceeds their current case flow.
Common buying mistakes
- Buying volume you can’t answer fast enough.
- Switching vendors every two weeks chasing a “better” CPL.
- Measuring CPL instead of cost per signed case.
- Letting case managers double as intake — sign-up rate collapses.
- Accepting a verbal credit policy instead of a written one.
- Buying five states at once before proving the intake script in one.
Our terms — lead return guarantee, pilot, delivery
Most of the friction in this market comes from terms that are only explained on a discovery call. Ours are published here so you can compare them against anyone else’s before you speak to us.
Lead return guarantee
If a delivered MVA lead fails the criteria agreed in writing before delivery, you should not pay for it. On our month-to-month supply, leads in the wrong state, with no injury, already represented, or unreachable are credited against the next invoice. On the 90-Day Run and the 30-in-30, duplicates, wrong-state leads, and dead contact details are replaced one for one within 48 hours. Get any vendor's version in writing.
Trial, pilot, and minimum commitment
You can test MVA lead supply on a capped order rather than an open-ended contract. Our 30-in-30 delivers thirty exclusive leads inside thirty days for $9,750 paid in full — about $325 a lead — and the whole cost is credited against the 90-Day Run if you upgrade within 14 days of onboarding. Judge the pilot on cost per signed case, not on how the first week feels. Full terms are on the 30-in-30 pilot; the per-lead rate is lower than the rate card because the thirty are bought as one prepaid block.
Delivery speed and integration
Case-type and geography filters
MVA lead targeting is set by state and, inside a state, by metro — statewide, or narrowed to the cities your firm actually serves. Los Angeles County and Cook County are priced as markets of their own. What you buy is lead exclusivity, not territory exclusivity: other firms in your city may buy from us too, but never the same lead. Raise tighter geography on the call.
Collision mechanism works the same way — tell us whether you want or decline rear-end, T-bone, head-on, or hit-and-run crashes, as set out under each qualification filter. Screening is on the claimant’s own account; the lead record does not include a police report, and police-report verified MVA leads are a different product with different risks.
Measuring return
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page traces to the MVA Lead Cost Report 2026, which is built from campaign delivery data and buyer-reported intake outcomes across 14 markets, collected January 2025 to July 2026. The report publishes its own methodology and limitations, and the underlying figures are available as machine-readable JSON so they can be checked rather than taken on trust.
We publish ranges rather than single numbers because case mix, metro, and intake speed genuinely move the results, and a single number would be a marketing figure rather than a measurement. Related reading: running your own PPC versus buying leads sets out when building your own funnel beats purchasing supply — which is a real scenario, and one worth understanding before you commit to either.
What this looks like when it works
Published pricing is one kind of evidence; a controlled result with a real firm is another. Below is the eleven-week field test we ran with a four-attorney Florida firm buying exclusive supply, with lead source, price, and volume held constant.