The best life insurance leads: how to choose the right ones for your firm

The best life insurance leads are the ones your firm turns into policies that stay on risk, at a lead cost your commission can carry. That makes “best” a question about your firm as much as the seller: a fresh enquiry that only your firm receives tends to suit a solo adviser, while a telephone brokerage with a dialler may place policies more cheaply from leads that cost less. This guide gives you seven tests for lead quality, ranks the main lead types for common UK firm models, explains how top 10 lists and reviews can mislead, and shows how to test two providers side by side before you scale up.

What makes the best life insurance leads?

Sellers describe their leads as premium, qualified, verified or high intent. None of those labels has an agreed meaning in the UK market, so they tell you what a seller wants to charge rather than what a lead will do. The seven tests below are what the best leads have in common, and each is something you can check before you buy or within a few weeks of buying.

Intent and freshness

Intent is where leads sold under the same name differ most, so ask every seller who started the conversation. An enquiry the customer made on a page about life cover is a different lead from one built on a prize-draw entry or a cold call, even when both are sold as fresh.

The FCA’s consumer research for its protection market study shows how often buyers make the first move themselves. Of recent buyers who used a firm’s help, 30% found that firm through a recommendation from friends or family and 27% by searching online and contacting it directly, although the base was small (about 600 people). Neither figure measures intent, but both routes start with the customer choosing to get in touch, which is the moment a genuine enquiry captures.

Freshness protects that intent. Contact rates tend to drop quickly after an enquiry, so judge a seller on the time between the customer sending an enquiry and the lead reaching you, and ask whether that time is measured or only promised. Our guide to real-time leads covers the research on response times and how to be ready when a lead lands.

Exclusivity and consent

Exclusivity decides whether you’re the only firm calling about an enquiry. Consent decides whether you can show that the customer expected a call at all. Ask for both in writing: the seller’s definition of exclusive and any time limit on it, and the exact wording and timestamp behind each lead. The exclusive leads guide explains how to check that exclusive really means one firm.

Fit, contactability and price

Fit matters because the premium sets your commission. The FCA’s interim report on protection distribution puts typical initial commission at between 170% and 250% of first-year premium. Illustrative example: on that basis a policy at £10 a month earns roughly £204 to £300 of initial commission, usually paid up front and repayable if the policy lapses within the clawback period, and one at £40 a month roughly £816 to £1,200. The same lead price can be comfortable on one case and a loss on the other, so the filters a seller lets you set are part of what you’re buying.

Contactability is the quickest test to read: within a week of buying you’ll know how many numbers connect and how many emails bounce. Ask what checks the seller runs before delivery, and what it credits when they fail. A “qualified” label might mean a checked phone number, answers given on a form or a conversation with a call centre, and our guide to qualified life insurance leads separates those meanings.

Price comes last because it only means something against your conversion rate and your case size. Illustrative example: a £60 lead that becomes a policy one time in eight carries £480 of lead cost per policy. On the £10-a-month case above, that is more than the whole initial commission, while on the £40-a-month case it leaves roughly £336 to £720 for advice time, clawback and profit. These figures are examples, not Protection Connect results.

Sellers sometimes call their dearest product premium life insurance leads. The word may describe the price more than the lead, so ask which of the seven tests it actually improves.

Which type of life insurance lead is best?

None of the four common lead types is best in every case. Each one trades price against some of the seven tests, and the scale below shows where advertised prices for each type tend to sit.

Aged£1 to £10Weeks or months old, often sold many times

Shared£10 to £25One enquiry sold to several firms at once

Exclusive£30 to £80A fresh enquiry supplied to one firm only

Hotkey£60 to £120Qualified by a call centre and transferred live

Cheaper, older, sharedFresher, exclusive, dearer

Indicative ranges based on our view of typically advertised UK prices in 2026. Not a survey and not Protection Connect prices; on Protection Connect you set your own maximum.

This is how each type usually scores on the tests that separate a good lead from an expensive one. Treat them as tendencies rather than rules: a carefully run aged-lead process can beat exclusive enquiries that nobody calls until the next day.

Aged and shared leads are cheaper to buy and weaker on intent or competition. Cheap can still be the right choice when your process makes up the difference, and our guide to aged life insurance leads sets out when old data is still worth calling. Hotkeys hand you a live conversation, but the call that produced it was usually the seller’s rather than the customer’s, which changes both the call and the compliance questions.

To see which type is best for your firm in money terms, put your own numbers into the calculator.

Calculator

Which lead type costs least per policy at your firm?

Enter what each type of lead costs you and how many of those leads become policies. The shortest bar is the best buy on lead cost alone.

Aged leadWeeks or months old

Price per lead in pounds, Aged lead

£

Become policies as a percentage, Aged lead

%

Shared leadSold to several firms

Price per lead in pounds, Shared lead

£

Become policies as a percentage, Shared lead

%

Exclusive leadReal time, one firm

Price per lead in pounds, Exclusive lead

£

Become policies as a percentage, Exclusive lead

%

Hotkey transferLive call transfer

Price per lead in pounds, Hotkey transfer

£

Become policies as a percentage, Hotkey transfer

%

Lowest lead cost per policy

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Illustrative calculator: the default prices sit inside our indicative market ranges and the conversion rates are examples, not Protection Connect results or a forecast. Use your own numbers.

Illustrative example: the defaults describe a small advice firm that calls its own leads. Exclusive enquiries at £45 that convert at 10% cost £450 per policy. Aged leads at £5 converting at 1% and hotkeys at £90 converting at 18% both come to £500. Shared leads at £15 cost the most per policy, £750, because a small firm is rarely the first of several callers and converts only 2% of them. These rates are examples, not Protection Connect results.

Now change one number. A telephone brokerage with a dialler and a team ready to call might convert 4% of the same shared leads. Its shared cost per policy falls to £375, below the exclusive figure. Same leads, same prices, a different firm and a different answer. Our comparison of exclusive vs shared life insurance leads looks at that trade-off, including what several calls about one enquiry do to the customer’s experience.

Lead cost per policy isn’t the whole bill. A lower conversion rate means more leads, more dials and more adviser time behind every policy, and none of that shows in the calculator. Add it before you decide.

Which leads are best for your type of firm?

Start with your own operation rather than the seller’s rate card. The best leads for life insurance work at a one-adviser firm are rarely the best for a sales floor, because three things differ: how many people can call, how quickly they can call, and what an average case earns. The table is a starting point for common UK firm models, and the notes after it explain the reasoning.

Solo advisers and small advice firms

Your scarcest resource is time. A firm with a dialler will usually reach a shared lead before you do, and every hour spent chasing an unanswered number is an hour not spent advising. Enquiries supplied to your firm alone remove the race, so they are the natural fit, bought in small daily numbers you can call promptly.

Your own referrals and reviews of existing clients usually cost you less in cash, so treat bought leads as a top-up rather than the whole diary. Bulk aged data still needs its consent checked and its numbers screened against the TPS before you call, and that work is hard to justify at small volumes.

Mortgage advisers adding protection

Your mortgage and remortgage clients are usually your strongest protection leads: they know you, and the need is in front of them. More than 40% of mortgage holders don’t have life insurance, according to the FCA’s Financial Lives 2024 survey as cited in its interim report, so there may well be a gap in your own client bank before you buy a single lead.

A bought enquiry has no file, no history and no mortgage case to anchor the conversation, so the first call has to earn the trust a client already gives you. Use bought leads to keep advisers busy when the mortgage pipeline slows, and check what your network or principal allows before you buy anything.

Telephone brokerages with a sales floor

You have the capacity to work volume, which makes shared and even aged leads workable where a solo adviser would struggle. The risks grow with the volume. Each new source brings its own consent wording to check and its own TPS question to settle, and several firms ringing the same customer about one enquiry affects that customer’s experience. The Consumer Duty expects firms to avoid causing foreseeable harm, including to people who aren’t yet their clients, so ask your compliance adviser how it applies to the way you work shared leads.

Clawback is where weak sales catch up with a firm. Elixir, an industry group representing insurers, told the FCA that its members wrote off about £100m of commission clawback debt between 2019 and July 2025, and the FCA’s interim report attributes more than 95% of those write-offs to phone-based sales firms. Elixir linked the debt to some intermediaries selling new policies to cover clawbacks on earlier ones until they left the market, and the FCA noted that the sums were under 1% of premiums collected between 2021 and 2024.

Leads aren’t named as the cause, but the lesson holds for any volume model: judge each source on policies still on risk, not on applications. If you buy live transfers, our hotkey leads guide covers how the outbound call behind each one should be made.

Over-50s specialists

The customer and the economics are different from term cover. Guaranteed acceptance plans have no health questions, so insurers typically apply a waiting period, often 12 or 24 months, at the start: on a death that isn’t accidental in that period, most plans refund the premiums paid instead of paying the sum assured. Over a long life, total premiums can also exceed the payout. Making sure the customer understands both points is the heart of the sale, and the FCA’s guidance on the fair treatment of vulnerable customers (FG21/1) is especially relevant here.

The best leads here come from people who asked about over-50s cover themselves, with clear consent, after adverts that didn’t pressure them. Be wary of transfers built on cold calls to older people. Our guide to over-50s life insurance leads goes further.

Set your maximum price from the commission you actually earn on over-50s plans, not from your term cases. According to Swiss Re’s Term & Health Watch 2025, the average guaranteed acceptance plan sold in 2024 cost about £290 a year for about £4,069 of cover, against about £375 a year for the average new level term policy. The cover is a small fraction of a term case’s, but the average premium isn’t, so let your own commission terms, not the cover amount, set your maximum.

New advisers

Your first job is to learn your own conversion rate without running out of money. Buy a small, capped number of enquiries you can call properly, avoid long contracts and prepaid bundles, and keep a reserve for clawback, because indemnity commission arrives before a policy has shown it will stay on risk. The FCA’s interim report found that around 96% of protection commission is paid upfront, so an early lapse can take back money you have already spent on leads.

Before you call anyone, make sure your firm or principal is satisfied you’re competent to advise on the cover these customers want, and that your advice is supervised while you learn. Our guide to leads for new advisers covers how to start without overspending.

If you searched for the best life insurance leads for agents

Most pages that answer that search are American, written for agents licensed by a state and selling “final expense” cover. UK regulation works through firms: the FCA authorises the business, not the individual seller.

Your route in is as an adviser in a directly authorised firm, as an appointed representative (AR) of a principal, or as an adviser working for an AR, and the nearest UK product to final expense is the over-50s plan. If you’re an AR, the best leads are the ones your principal has approved, so start with its lead-sourcing rules. Our guide to leads for UK agents and appointed representatives covers principals’ rules and network schemes in detail.

Which company has the best life insurance leads?

No company has the best leads for every firm, so treat any ranking as a list of names to check. Searches for top rated life insurance leads or the best life insurance lead companies mostly return American lists, or pages published by sellers and their affiliates. When we looked in October 2026 for an independent comparison of the best life insurance leads UK firms can buy, we found none.

The names you do find usually belong to one of a handful of seller types: lead marketplaces, lead generators running their own websites, comparison and affiliate sites, call centres selling hotkeys, data brokers, and network or principal schemes. Each suits a different kind of firm, and our guide to the kinds of UK lead seller sets out what to check with each.

Why top 10 lists can mislead

• The list is published by a seller, which tends to place itself near the top.
• The author is paid when you sign up, so the order can follow the fee.
• The sellers are American, with US prices, products and rules that don’t apply to a UK firm.
• One ranking is meant to suit every buyer, from a solo adviser to a hundred-seat sales floor.
• Conversion or return figures appear with no word on who measured them, over what period or for which kind of firm.

How to read life insurance leads reviews

Reviews help when you read them as evidence rather than votes. Look for these signs that a review tells you something useful.

• A reviewer like you: a UK protection firm of a similar size, buying the same lead type for the same product.
• Specifics: what they bought, how many, over what period, and what happened to the policies.
• Patterns in the complaints: duplicates, credits refused, contracts that roll over, numbers that never connect.
• Recent dates. A seller’s sources, prices and terms can change completely in a year.
• Consumer reviews of the seller’s own consumer website. If customers say several firms rang them, or they didn’t know who would call, that tells you about consent and exclusivity.

Then go beyond reviews. Ask each seller for two references from firms like yours, look it up on the FCA Financial Services Register, and search the ICO’s enforcement notices and the ASA’s rulings for its name. We don’t publish testimonials or marketplace statistics, so judge us the same way as anyone else: on the scorecard below and on a capped trial.

How do you score a lead provider before you buy?

A scorecard puts every seller through the same questions before you spend anything. The one below weights the checks that matter most for compliance and conversion, the seller’s FCA status, exclusivity and consent, above convenience features. Use it on each provider you’re considering, us included.

Checklist

Score a lead seller in ten questions

Answer for one seller at a time. Questions you leave blank count as not sure, and the list under the score shows what to ask next.

• Is the seller FCA authorised (or an appointed representative), and does it check the FCA status of the firms it sells to?
  Yes Not sure No

  You are responsible for how you use the data. A seller that checks nobody is selling to anybody.

• Is each lead sold to one firm only, and never resold later?
  Yes Not sure No

  Ask whether “exclusive” lasts for ever or only for a day or a week.

• Can you see the exact consent wording the customer agreed to?
  Yes Not sure No

  You need to know the customer asked to be contacted, by whom and how, before you call.

• Does each lead show the website and date it came from?
  Yes Not sure No

  Origin and timestamp help with compliance checks and with judging quality.

• Are leads delivered as soon as the customer enquires?
  Yes Not sure No

  Delays between enquiry and delivery cost contact rate.

• Can you choose ages, smoker status and cover amounts?
  Yes Not sure No

  Targeting stops you paying for enquiries you cannot place.

• Is there a written credit policy for invalid numbers and duplicates?
  Yes Not sure No

  Look for clear grounds, a time limit and how credits are paid.

• No long-term contract and no minimum monthly spend?
  Yes Not sure No

  Lets you test at low volume and stop if the numbers do not work.

• Can you cap daily spend and pause buying yourself?
  Yes Not sure No

  Control over volume protects your diary and your cash flow.

• Is the price clear before you commit any money?
  Yes Not sure No

  You should know the most you can be charged per lead.

Provider score

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A checklist to structure your due diligence, not a rating of any named provider and not legal or compliance advice.

Illustrative example: a seller of shared leads that answers every question openly, with yes to everything except the exclusivity question, scores 86 out of 100. A seller that calls its leads exclusive but won’t show you its consent wording, and can’t say whether it checks its buyers’ FCA status, scores 75, even with yes everywhere else. Openness about the basics counts for more than the label on the lead.

The scorecard covers the essentials. To find the best life insurance leads rather than acceptable ones, add four questions of your own.

• Can I see a sample lead, with every field I’ll receive and every field I won’t?
• What does “qualified” or “premium” mean in your terms, and how much does it add to the price?
• What happens to an enquiry no buyer takes: is it deleted, kept, or sold later?
• Can I see the form and page each customer used, as they looked on the day of the enquiry?

How do you test two lead providers side by side?

A scorecard tells you whether a seller is worth trying. Only a trial tells you whether they are the best life insurance leads for your firm, and the fairest trial runs two providers at the same time, under the same conditions, so the leads are the only thing that differs.

1. Match the orderThe same product, age band, smoker status and cover filters, and the same budget for each provider. If one seller can’t match a filter, write it down.
2. Run both at onceBuy over the same weeks, so holidays, price changes and your own workload affect both sources equally.
3. Give both the same treatmentThe same advisers, contact plan and number of attempts. If one adviser takes every lead from one source, you’re testing the adviser.
4. Tag the source before the first callRecord contact, fact-find, recommendation, application, policy on risk and any credit claimed, by source, in your CRM. Note too whether a sale replaced cover the customer already had, and why, so a source that mainly produces switches doesn’t look better than it is.
5. Decide on policies still on riskCompare lead cost per policy when policies are issued, then again three months later, when early cancellations and lapses start to show.

Reading the result

Illustrative example: you buy 60 leads from each of two providers over the same six weeks, and the table shows what happens.

Provider A looks far cheaper when the policies are issued. Three months later, after two early cancellations, the two sources cost about the same per policy, and Provider A reached only 24 of its 60 customers, against 42 of 60 for Provider B. These figures are examples, not Protection Connect results.

Look at how few policies sit behind each figure. Had Provider A kept four policies on risk instead of three, its cost per policy would be £300 and the result would flip. At this size a £14 gap between two sources tells you very little, and in your own trial the cheaper source may well come out ahead: the point is to judge on policies still on risk rather than assume.

Keep both running until each has placed enough policies for the gap to mean something. For a small firm that usually means a longer test at a low daily cap rather than a bigger budget. Our guide to budgeting for life insurance leads helps you set the cap, and our 30-day test plan shows how to set a pass mark and a stop line for each source before you start.

Finally, make sure your contact plan gives both sources a fair chance, using only the contact methods each customer agreed to and stopping as soon as someone asks you to. A trial run on one call attempt per lead mostly measures who answers first time, and our guide to converting life insurance leads sets out a fuller plan.

Why is compliance part of lead quality?

Because a lead you can’t defend is one you can end up paying for twice: once to the seller, and again in complaints, clawback or regulatory risk. The general rules on buying and calling leads are summarised in our guide to the UK rules for life insurance leads. This section covers the points where compliance and quality turn out to be the same question.

How the customer was persuaded

The advert behind a lead shapes what the customer expects. The ASA has ruled against life insurance lead generators for misleading ads, including not making clear they were collecting people’s details for lead generation. A customer who thought they were comparing quotes isn’t expecting an adviser’s call, and that is a weak foundation under the Consumer Duty, which covers people who haven’t yet become your clients. Ask every seller to show you the adverts and pages that produce its leads.

Who made the first contact

Leads built on outbound calls or bought data are only as sound as the calls and lists behind them, and a seller’s assurance isn’t evidence. The ICO’s £160,000 penalty against an energy firm in May 2026 shows the risk: the firm had bought call data without checking whether it had been screened against the TPS, and for some of it couldn’t say where it had come from. The sector was different, but the lesson for protection firms buying hotkeys or data is the same: ask for the evidence, and keep it.

Whether the policy stays on risk

Quality shows up after the sale too. Some firms told the FCA, in evidence for its interim report, that some early lapses may be due to poor-quality leads from lead generators. The highest first-year lapse rate in the same report, 23%, was on non-advised intermediated sales with four-year clawback (2024 data), although some firms linked that rate to customers buying complex products without advice.

Lapses have many causes, so read these findings as a reason to track lapses by source, not as a verdict on any lead type. Clawback periods are generally two or four years, so a weak lead can cost you commission long after you paid for it.

Who the seller is

The seller’s own status is part of the lead. A business paid to gather enquiries that asks people questions about the cover they want would typically need to be FCA authorised or an appointed representative, even though your buying the lead isn’t itself a regulated activity. Look it up on the FCA Register before you spend anything, and take any claim that it needs neither to your compliance adviser or network.

Don’t expect the regulator to vet sellers for you. The FCA considered making intermediaries report which lead generators they use, but its final market study report in September 2026 dropped the idea as costly and of uncertain benefit, saying it would keep monitoring outcomes from switching through supervision. The checking stays with you.

How do Protection Connect leads measure up?

Protection Connect is a trading style of PJG Financial Limited, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 919697). Only FCA authorised firms and their appointed representatives can buy, and every application is verified against the FCA register. Against the seven tests:

On LifeAdviser the customer ticks: “I’d like Life Adviser, a trading style of PJG Financial Limited, to contact me about life insurance by phone or email. I have read the Privacy Policy and Terms.” They are then told an FCA authorised adviser firm will contact them and that the firm pays us a fee, at no extra cost to them. Your firm’s name isn’t shown before they send it, so say who you are when you call.

Because the tick names Life Adviser rather than your firm, check with your compliance adviser how PECR applies to the way you contact each enquiry. As general rules, a live marketing call to a TPS-registered number needs the person to have told your firm they don’t object to your calls, and email or text marketing needs consent that names your firm and the channel. We ask every firm to confirm it checks numbers against the TPS where required before calling.

To trial us, top up from £250 and cap each campaign by daily spend or leads. We’re not the right choice for cheap volume or for critical illness or income protection leads. Before you top up, your dashboard shows whether enquiries are being supplied. See how it works, a sample enquiry and what it costs to start, or the marketplace explained in our main guide.

Questions brokers ask about choosing the best leads

Sources and further reading

1. FCA: Pure protection market study, consumer research summary (fieldwork September to October 2025)
2. FCA: Distribution of pure protection products to retail customers, market study interim report (MS24/1.4), January 2026
3. Swiss Re: Term & Health Watch 2025 (2024 new business data)
4. FCA: Financial Services Register
5. ASA: Ruling on a life insurance lead generator’s online ads, 1 February 2023
6. FCA: Consumer Duty
7. ICO: Glasgow-based energy company fined £160,000 for making unsolicited marketing calls (May 2026)
8. FCA: Pure protection market study final report (MS24/1.5), September 2026