How Much Does Checkatrade Cost? The Published Prices, and What They Leave Out

The Real Cost of Checkatrade, Beyond the Headline Price

Short answer: Checkatrade’s own pricing page lists three plans for trades. Free is £0 a month, Approved is £30 a month, and Growth shows “Prices from £59/mo”.

That’s the advertised price. The real cost sits around it: the contract you sign, a Growth price that moves, and an enquiry you may not have to yourself.

If you’ve searched “how much does Checkatrade cost” and found three different answers on three different forums, this piece is for you.

We’ll show you the prices exactly as Checkatrade publishes them, what the page doesn’t say, and what to ask before you sign.

What Checkatrade charges: the three published plans

Checkatrade publishes its trade prices at join.checkatrade.com/pricing. We opened that page in a browser on 30 September 2026 and took a screenshot.

Here’s what it shows, and what it leaves blank.

Plan	Price on the plan card	VAT on the card?	Contract length on the card?
Free	£0/month	Not shown	Not shown
Approved	£30/month	Not shown	Not shown
Growth	Prices from £59/mo	Not shown	Not shown

Free is described as “a free profile to collect reviews”. Approved is a flat £30 a month.

Growth is the one to read closely, because it’s the only price with the word “from” in front of it.

How much does Checkatrade cost per month? On its own pricing page, £0 for Free, £30 for Approved, and from £59 for Growth.

The plan cards don’t say whether those figures include VAT, so ask before you sign.

Why £59 is a starting point on the Growth plan

The Growth card on Checkatrade’s page tells you the price isn’t fixed. It says “Pick a plan that fits: top up your workload or lock in a steady stream of customer enquiries”.

Payments through Checkatrade Pay carry their own fees, “from 1.29%-1.79%”.

So Growth is a menu, and £59 is the cheapest item on it.

Independent reviewers say the same. Local Search North’s review says the Growth price is set by your trade, the postcodes you cover and how many enquiries you want, so “£59 is a starting point rather than a typical bill”.

What do members pay in practice? Local Adder’s lead-cost tracker collects member-reported bills, and they run from £80 up to £500 a month.

Think of it like a van hire quote. The day rate on the website is real, and so is everything the counter adds once you say what you need.

The £50 fee in Checkatrade’s own terms

The plan cards show no joining fee. Checkatrade’s own Definitions and Interpretation page describes one it can charge.

Checkatrade’s definitions page says: “Application Fee means the fee (currently £50) that Checkatrade may charge (which may include part or all of a Member’s initial Membership Fee) to enable Checkatrade to process an application to become a Member or to vary a Membership category”.

Read that wording carefully. It says “may charge”, so it won’t necessarily apply to you. And it “may include part or all of” your first membership fee, so it may not be £50 on top.

One independent review, Local Search North’s, says there is no joining fee at all. The definitions page still reserves the right to charge one.

Both can be true on the day you join. The safe move is to ask Checkatrade, in writing, whether an Application Fee applies to you.

The tie-in: what reviews of the member terms report

The plan cards show no contract length. Independent reviews of Checkatrade’s member terms fill that gap.

Websites for Tradespeople’s guide, which says it checked the terms on 15 September 2026, reports that Approved and Growth both run for 12 months and renew automatically.

It also reports how you stop that renewal. Only the business owner can do it, by phone, no earlier than 35 days before the renewal date, and an email doesn’t count.

The same guide reports a two-business-day window at the start to cancel without paying anything further.

We haven’t read Checkatrade’s member terms ourselves, so treat those points as the reviewers’ reading, and check your own agreement.

Can I get out of my Checkatrade contract? According to those reviews, there are two routes: cancel within two business days of the start, or have the owner phone in the window before renewal so the contract ends at the end of its 12 months.

ContentWorks’ own search research found Google suggesting these questions to people searching about Checkatrade: “Is Checkatrade a 12 month contract?”, “What are the cancellation fees for Checkatrade?” and “Can I get out of my Checkatrade contract?”

Those are questions from someone already looking for the door.

The cost that doesn’t show up on the invoice

Here’s the part Checkatrade’s pricing page doesn’t cover. Once an enquiry comes in, how many other businesses are chasing the same job?

Checkatrade does not publish how many members an enquiry is shared with.

The Growth card offers to “lock in a steady stream of customer enquiries”. It doesn’t say whether you’re the only business that sees each one.

Is a lead shared with other trades when I pay for it? For Checkatrade, there’s no published answer. Ask them before you sign, and get the answer in writing.

For contrast, Bark puts a cap in its customer terms.

Bark’s Customer Terms, clause 2.5(a), says “a maximum of five Professionals will contact you directly”.

That’s Bark’s contract, not Checkatrade’s. And it’s a maximum, so fewer than five may call.

If other businesses see the same enquiry, each one is another quote in front of the customer before you’ve spoken to them. That’s why the number is worth asking for.

It’s the same pattern behind being invisible on Google Maps. The platform decides how many businesses stand between you and the customer.

What owning it costs instead

We publish our own prices in full, for the same reason we wrote this piece.

Route	Cost	Terms
Foundation Build (one-off, every plan)	£1,500 with any plan / £1,750 alone	one-off
Bronze	£500 a month	30 days’ notice, no tie-in
Silver	£950 a month	30 days’ notice, no tie-in
Gold	£1,500 a month	30 days’ notice, no tie-in
Platinum	from £2,000 a month	three-month minimum

Every plan is done for you, written and published on your behalf. You own everything we build, whether you stay with us or not.

Is that cheaper than Checkatrade? No, and we won’t pretend it is. It buys something different.

A lead platform is rented space. Your place in its queue lasts as long as your membership does. Your own Google ranking, reviews and website keep working after you leave.

Roofers weighing up the same trade-off can see it laid out on our leads for roofers page. How it works covers the mechanics end to end, and what you get lists every line item.

Want to see where your own business stands first? The free Visibility Scorecard takes about four minutes and shows where you’re losing work today.

If you want a person to go through it with you, the £197 Visibility Game Plan is a human-led diagnosis with a fix plan, credited against any plan you start within 30 days.

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