Post a kitchen extension job on one of the big trade platforms at nine in the evening and your phone will not be quiet at quarter past. Homeowners describe the same sequence again and again: several calls in quick succession, a couple pushing for a site visit that week, at least one asking whether you've had other quotes yet.
That isn't coincidence, and mostly it isn't bad manners either. It's the charging mechanic doing exactly what it was built to do. Every trade who rang you had already paid, or was about to pay, for the right to have your number, and a fee you've already spent concentrates the mind.
Who Actually Pays
You don't. On every major UK platform the homeowner posts free, searches free and reads reviews free. The tradesperson is the paying customer.
There's nothing underhand about that. Finding a competent builder from a standing start is a genuinely hard problem, directories solve a real part of it, and charging trades for access to work is a perfectly legitimate business model. Advertising has worked this way for a century. What matters to you is that the model isn't neutral. It decides how many trades hear about your job, how fast they call, how motivated they are to close you, and what their cost of sale looks like before they've priced a single course of blockwork.
Know which model the platform runs and you can read the behaviour instead of being surprised by it.
The Four Ways a Directory Charges
| Model | What the trade pays | Examples | What you notice |
|---|---|---|---|
| Subscription / membership | A flat monthly or annual fee for the listing, with no charge per enquiry | TrustATrader, Which? Trusted Traders, Checkatrade's non-lead listing tier | Fewer, calmer approaches. The trade has already paid whether you call or not |
| Pay-per-lead | A fee each time the platform passes them a job that matches | Rated People (membership plus lead charges), Checkatrade's lead-generating plans | Several trades contact you about one posted job, because the platform sold it to each of them |
| Pay-per-shortlist | Nothing to view the job. A fee lands the moment you shortlist them | MyBuilder | A first message that reads oddly formal, then a fast phone call the second you show interest |
| Credit packs | Prepaid credits bought in bulk, spent to unlock your contact details | Bark | The widest spread of approaches, since a lead can go out to several trades at once |
The pay-per-shortlist model is the genuinely different one, and it explains the fastest callbacks. On MyBuilder, a trade can send you exactly one introductory message, scanned to strip out phone numbers and email addresses. You can shortlist or reject, and nothing else. The moment you shortlist, that trade is invoiced the fee plus VAT and the contact details unlock in both directions. So the call you get thirty seconds later comes from someone who has just been charged for the privilege of making it.
There's a fifth model people assume exists and it mostly doesn't. Commission on the final job value, where the platform takes a percentage of what you pay, has effectively vanished from the UK homeowner market. None of the major directories runs it as their primary mechanic. The clearest UK precedent is Amazon Home Services, which took 20% on jobs up to £1,000 and 15% above that before passing the balance to the trade, and which no longer operates here. If you've ever wondered why a platform seems indifferent to whether your job actually completes, that's why: almost all of them are paid at the introduction, not at the handshake.
What Each One Costs the Trade
Pin down current prices and you hit an immediate problem. Almost none of these companies publish a full price list, and the detailed figures floating around the search results come overwhelmingly from lead-generation and web-design agencies selling tradespeople an alternative product. They have a commercial interest in the numbers looking painful. Treat the top of every reported range as an upper-bound anecdote rather than a typical bill.
| Platform | Reported cost to the tradesperson | Source and confidence |
|---|---|---|
| Checkatrade | £30 a month plus VAT for a listing that generates no leads; lead-generating plans quoted from £59 a month, priced by trade and postcode. Real bills reported anywhere from £80 to over £500 a month | The two entry figures are Checkatrade's own published material (2026). The higher spread comes from third-party agency round-ups (2024-2026) and should be read as anecdote, not median |
| MyBuilder | No membership fee. Shortlist fee from £7, commonly reported at £5 to £35, one source citing up to £60, scaling with estimated job value | The 'from £7' is MyBuilder's own figure. The ranges are third-party guides (2026) |
| Rated People | Roughly £30 to £60 a month including a credit allowance, plus roughly £15 to £40 for leads beyond it. Included credits reportedly expire with the billing period | Third-party guides (2026) that disagree among themselves. Not published by Rated People, so treat as indicative only |
| Bark | No membership on the standard tier. Credits at roughly £1.20 to £1.80 plus VAT each, a single lead costing roughly £5 to £45. Credits bought on or after 1 November 2025 expire after three months | Third-party guides (2026). The credit expiry change is a dated, verifiable policy shift |
| TrustATrader | Reported at roughly £600 to £1,000 a year, quoted by trade and area, with no per-lead charge and a cap on members per postcode | Third-party guides (2026) only. No primary price list was found, so treat the figure as unconfirmed |
| Which? Trusted Traders | A one-off assessment fee of £240 including VAT for businesses under 19 employees, then membership from around £60 a month including VAT | Corroborated across two independent research passes (2026). The highest-confidence figure here |
| FMB | Sources conflict: around £56.99 plus VAT a month with a first-year inspection fee, or around £550 plus VAT a year | FMB-linked and third-party guides (2024-2026). Genuinely contradictory, so read it as a spread rather than a price |
Two patterns are worth carrying away from that table. The first is that a trade on a membership model pays the same whether your job lands or not, so their incentive is to keep the listing busy rather than to chase you specifically. The second is that on lead and credit models, a trade can spend real money on your job and never speak to you, which is why the follow-up is quick and the pitch is warm.
Why the Phone Rings Five Times
One job, several buyers. That's the whole explanation.
Bark's model pushes a posted job out to multiple tradespeople, typically up to five, each of whom spends credits to reach you. Rated People is reported to cap the number of trades a single lead goes to at three, often fewer, though that cap comes from third-party sourcing rather than the platform's own published terms. MyBuilder's fee only triggers on shortlist, so the burst arrives after you engage rather than before it.
Look at it from the other side of the phone and the urgency makes sense. A trade who has paid to reach you and doesn't get through has bought nothing. Platform terms are generally explicit that a fee buys the introduction, not a conversation, a quote or a job, and tradespeople complain loudly and publicly about paying for leads that never answer. Fast, assertive follow-up is the rational response to that, not a character flaw.
It does mean the pressure you feel is manufactured by the fee structure rather than by the state of your project. You are not late. Nobody's diary is filling up this afternoon. Take the week you need.
How That Cost Reaches Your Quote
Here's where honesty matters, because the internet is confident about something nobody has measured.
No study, regulator finding or public dataset quantifies how much a directory's fees move the price a homeowner is quoted. Anyone handing you a percentage is guessing. What can be said, and said firmly, is the underlying business arithmetic: a cost of sale has to be recovered somewhere. It sits in the same column as the van, the yard, the accountant and the public liability premium, and it gets spread across the jobs the business actually wins. A trade paying a membership plus lead fees who converts one enquiry in five is carrying the cost of the four that went nowhere. That money comes out of quoted work, because there is nowhere else for it to come from.
Three honest limits on that reasoning, though.
It's a small line in a large overhead. Scope differences, provisional sums and VAT registration status routinely put five figures between quotes for the same extension, which dwarfs any plausible lead-fee effect. Before you blame the platform for a high number, normalise the quotes properly and see whether the gap survives.
Directory spend replaces other marketing, it doesn't stack on top of it. A trade who wins work through a platform may be spending less on customer acquisition than one running Google Ads or paying for a van wrap. The recovery is real; the assumption that it makes them dearer than the alternative is not.
And some trades price the channel explicitly. Platforms commonly issue call-tracking numbers so a trade can tell which enquiries came through the platform, and at least one homeowner-facing analysis reports trades offering a keener price when a customer contacts them directly instead. Whether you'd get that treatment depends entirely on the individual firm.
Warning
Do not use any of this as a bargaining tactic. Telling a builder you know what they paid for your lead and expecting a discount reads as adversarial before you've even agreed a scope, and good firms have the option of simply not quoting. Use the knowledge to interpret the number, not to attack it.
Where TrustMark Sits, and Why the Badge Gets Misread
TrustMark is not a lead-generation platform, and it doesn't charge tradespeople a fee to reach you. It operates under a Master Licence Agreement from the Department for Business and Trade, is not-for-profit, and its funding comes from licensing arrangements with the scheme providers underneath it rather than from per-lead or per-listing charges.
The structure is three layers deep, which is where the confusion starts. TrustMark sits at the top. Beneath it are around 35 scheme providers, bodies like the FMB, NICEIC, Gas Safe and FENSA, who do the actual vetting through on-site inspections and financial checks. Beneath them sit 15,000-plus registered businesses across 156 trades. So when a builder shows you a TrustMark badge, TrustMark itself has not assessed them. Their scheme provider has, and the standard varies by which one. Ask which scheme provider registered them, then verify with that body directly.
TrustMark also mandates Insurance-Backed Guarantees on deposit-protected work, which is a real consumer protection, and it's compulsory for government-funded energy retrofit schemes. For a straightforward kitchen extension it's a useful signal rather than a requirement.
Vetting Is a Separate Question From Charging
Two things get conflated constantly: what a platform charges and what it checks. They're independent. A trade can pay a lot and have been checked lightly, or pay nothing and hold accreditations that carry statutory weight.
Know this before you assume the badge did your homework. Checkatrade's own published material is inconsistent on whether criminal record checking forms part of its process, with one blog description referring to it and the current published checks list not including it. If that matters to you for someone working in your house, ask the specific trade rather than inferring it from the badge. Public liability insurance is also requested during onboarding rather than mandated, so verify the certificate yourself.
The full breakdown of what each platform verifies, and which accreditations actually carry legal force, sits in how to find a builder you can trust. One piece of market context applies to every platform equally: the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act's ban on fake and incentivised reviews came into force on 6 April 2025, with the CMA moving to enforcement in July that year. Review manipulation is now a legal compliance question across the whole sector, not just a reputational one.
What One Real Build Actually Used
On a documented 55m² kitchen extension in Oxfordshire, exactly one trade out of more than fifteen came through a directory. The drainage and soakaway contractor was found on MyBuilder, quoted in July 2022 for trench work and a soakaway, and paid £3,250 in cash with no formal invoice.
Everyone else arrived through referral chains. The roofer was referred by the main contractor. The kitchen fitter, electrician, plumber, plasterer, tiler and the rest came through personal and professional networks. That is one build, not a market, so don't read it as a statistic. What it does illustrate cleanly is a pattern the industry recognises: directories get used for discrete, bounded, single-trade jobs where the risk is contained and the specification is obvious. The main contract, the one carrying most of the money and all of the sequencing risk, tends to come from someone who was recommended.
The cash payment is its own lesson, and not a good one. No receipt, no paper trail, no card protection, nothing to take to a court if the soakaway had failed. Whatever channel a trade comes from, pay in a way that leaves a record.
The Non-Commercial Alternatives
Two options exist that nobody is paid to put in front of you, and both are under-used.
External resource
Buy With Confidence
Run by local authority Trading Standards rather than a commercial platform. Businesses are vetted on references, complaint history and ongoing monitoring. Coverage varies by council, so check whether yours takes part.
buywithconfidence.gov.uk
External resource
TrustMark Find a Trader
The consumer-facing search for TrustMark registered businesses. No lead fee, no listing fee. Each business is vetted by its scheme provider, so check which one registered them.
trustmark.org.uk
Trading Standards running the first of those is the point. Neither tool charges the trade for the introduction, so neither has a reason to push a job at anyone. That also means neither will generate five phone calls, which is either the feature or the drawback depending on how much of a hurry you're in.
Referrals remain the strongest channel and cost nothing. Ask your neighbours, ask your architect, and ask any trade you already trust who they'd use. The best firms are booked from word of mouth and have no commercial reason to pay for a listing, which is precisely why some of them never appear on a platform at all.
What to Ask, and How to Read the Quote
Once you know where a trade came from, three questions cost you nothing and tell you a lot.
"Did you pay to reach me, and roughly what does a lead like this cost you?" Most will answer straight. It's no secret inside the trade, and the answer tells you how much cost-of-sale pressure sits behind the conversation.
"How many other trades do you think are quoting this from the same platform?" A trade who knows the answer understands the platform they're on. Four or five competing quotes on a small job also means four or five firms are carrying an unrecovered fee, which is where the fast, pushy follow-up comes from.
"Which scheme or body registered you, and can I verify it with them?" Any real accreditation survives that question comfortably.
Tip
Treat a directory as a longlist generator, never a shortlist. Take the names, then run your own checks: verify accreditation with the issuing body, ask for two completed extensions you can visit, speak to those homeowners without the builder present, and price the quotes line by line against one written brief you wrote yourself. The platform did the finding. The judging is still yours.
When the quotes arrive, don't try to back out a lead fee from the total. You can't, and guessing will mislead you. Do the ordinary work instead: check what's included, what's excluded, how provisional sums are set and whether VAT is in or out. If a directory-sourced quote still sits high after all of that, the sourcing channel is one candidate explanation among several, and rarely the biggest one.
The whole pre-construction sequence, sourcing through to signed contract, is mapped out task by task and free to browse.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Do builder directories charge homeowners anything?
No. On every major UK platform, homeowners post jobs, search listings and read reviews free of charge. The tradesperson is the paying customer, through a membership fee, a per-lead charge, a shortlist fee or prepaid credits. That's the single most useful thing to understand about how these sites work.
Why do I get so many calls after posting a job on a builder directory?
Because one job is sold to several trades. Bark pushes a posted job to multiple tradespeople, typically up to five, each spending credits to unlock your details. MyBuilder charges its fee the instant you shortlist someone, so the call comes seconds after you engage. Each caller has spent money to reach you and knows the fee buys an introduction, not a job.
Does using Checkatrade or MyBuilder mean I'll be quoted more?
Nobody has measured it, so treat any specific percentage you see as invented. What's certain is that a cost of sale has to be recovered across the jobs a business wins, the same as a van or an insurance premium. It's a small line against scope differences, provisional sums and VAT registration status, which routinely move quotes by five figures. Normalise the quotes before blaming the platform.
Is TrustMark a builder directory?
Not in the commercial sense. TrustMark is a not-for-profit operating under a licence from the Department for Business and Trade, and it charges tradespeople no lead or listing fee. It doesn't vet individual builders either. Around 35 scheme providers do that, and the badge tells you a business is registered with one of them rather than assessed by TrustMark itself.
Do any UK builder directories take a percentage of the final job value?
Not as their main model. Commission on job value has effectively disappeared from the UK homeowner market. The clearest precedent is Amazon Home Services, which charged 20% on jobs up to £1,000 and 15% above, and which no longer operates here. Today's platforms are almost all paid at the introduction, which is why their interest in your job tends to end once contact is made.
What is a free alternative to the commercial builder directories?
Buy With Confidence, run by local authority Trading Standards, and TrustMark's Find a Trader search. Neither charges the trade for the introduction, so neither has any incentive to push your job at anyone. Coverage is thinner and the response slower, but personal referrals plus one of these two gets you a longlist nobody was paid to hand you.