Insulation Cost Search Statistics 2026
Updated October 2026
The insulation industry prices work by the board foot and sells it as open cell or closed cell. Homeowners do not ask that way. We measured 593 human cost questions across 28 US insulation markets, and the gap between how the trade quotes and how buyers ask turned out to be the largest pattern in the data.
This is a first-party study. The demand figures come from Google Search Console data for insulation markets we operate, measured over the 90 days ending 7 October 2026. We observed 1,128 cost questions in total, then filtered to mobile-only traffic because rank-tracker bots inflate desktop impressions on these properties. That filter removes 72% of the raw impressions and leaves 593 questions and 3,497 impressions. Every share below is a share of that filtered set. The price figures come from six independent contractor pages we fetched and read directly. Every borrowed number names its source and date.
Key Takeaways
- Only 5.0% of insulation cost questions ask the price per square foot, and only 0.1% ask per board foot. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, 593 bot-filtered queries, October 2026)
- Only 2.3% of cost questions mention foam type at all. Closed cell appears in 1.5% and open cell in 0.8%. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
- 40.4% of cost questions are phrased as a total job, such as “how much does it cost to” or “cost to”. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
- Published closed-cell prices span $2.00 to $8.00 and more per square foot, a 4x spread across six contractors. (Southern Seal Insulation, 2026; Ecotelligent Homes, 2026)
- Two contractors price open cell above another contractor’s closed cell, inverting the industry’s own rule. (TLS Insulation, 2026; 3G Home Exteriors, 2026)
- 58.9% of this demand already sits on page one for us, and still converts almost nothing. Visibility is not the gap. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
What do homeowners actually ask about insulation cost?
Cost questions are not spread evenly across the house. They concentrate on one assembly, and they arrive already local.
Which part of the house drives cost questions?
- Attic questions account for 207 of the 593 cost queries and 60.3% of cost-intent impressions. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
- Crawl space and encapsulation are second at 21 queries and 1.9% of cost-intent impressions. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
- Insulation removal accounts for 18 queries and 0.8% of cost-intent impressions. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
- Whole house, roofline, walls, metal buildings and basements together account for under 1% of cost-intent impressions. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
The practical reading is that a cost page written about “insulation” in general is written about the leftovers. Six in ten cost questions are about one room.
How do they phrase the question?
- Total-job phrasings such as “how much does it cost to” and “cost to” appear in 149 queries and 40.4% of cost-intent impressions. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
- Quote and estimate phrasings appear in the remainder of the total-job group. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
- “near me” appears in 49 queries but only 2.5% of bot-filtered impressions, far below what unfiltered data suggests. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
Do homeowners ask in the units the industry prices in?
Almost never. This is the finding with the most direct consequence for anyone writing a price page.
- 5.0% of cost-intent impressions ask per square foot. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
- 0.1% of cost-intent impressions ask per board foot. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
- 1.5% mention closed cell. 0.8% mention open cell. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
Of the six contractor pages we verified, five lead with a per-square-foot figure and two publish per-board-foot figures. The trade publishes in the units used by 5.1% of the demand, and splits its tables by a distinction raised in 2.3% of it.
How much do published contractor prices disagree?
We fetched and read six independent contractor pricing pages across Georgia, Florida, Michigan and Tennessee. We excluded our own properties from this sample.
- Closed cell runs $2.00 to $4.50 per square foot in metro Atlanta. (Southern Seal Insulation, 2026)
- Closed cell runs $4.00 to $8.00 and more per square foot in southeast Michigan. (Ecotelligent Homes, 2026)
- Closed cell runs $5.00 to $7.00 per square foot elsewhere in southeast Michigan. (3G Home Exteriors, 2026)
- Open cell runs $1.00 to $2.50 per square foot in metro Atlanta. (Southern Seal Insulation, 2026)
- Open cell runs $3.00 to $5.00 per square foot in southeast Michigan. (3G Home Exteriors, 2026)
- Open cell runs $4.00 to $5.00 per square foot in Florida. (TLS Insulation, 2026)
- An all-in figure of $1.50 to $2.80 per square foot is published for central Florida. (All Florida Insulation, 2026)
- An all-in figure of $1.50 to $3.50 per square foot is published for Nashville. (Spray Foam Genie, 2026)
Three things follow from that list.
Closed-cell prices vary by about 4x between markets. Open-cell prices vary by about 5x. And the ordering breaks: open cell at $4.00 to $5.00 in Florida and $3.00 to $5.00 in Michigan sits above closed cell at $2.00 to $4.50 in Atlanta. A homeowner who learns that closed cell is the expensive one has learned something that does not survive a move between states.
The unit vocabulary breaks down inside single pages too. One contractor presents closed cell at $3.00 to $4.00 per board foot directly alongside open cell at $4.00 to $5.00 per square foot, two different units in one comparison. (TLS Insulation, 2026)
Who is answering these cost questions today?
We are, mostly. That is what makes this interesting. We measured where our own markets sit against this demand, and the answer is that visibility is not the problem.
- 54.9% of cost-intent impressions sit at position 4 to 10. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
- 24.2% sit at position 11 to 20. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
- 16.4% sit at position 21 to 50. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
- 4.0% sit at position 1 to 3. (Honey Badger SEO first-party study, October 2026)
Nearly six in ten of these impressions are already on page one, and the click-through on them is close to nothing. Being seen is not the gap. The gap is that the page a searcher lands on opens with a board-foot table when the person asked what an attic costs.
If you want that work done on your own site, that is what our insulation SEO service does.
Methodology and Sources
Demand data. Google Search Console API, query dimension, for 54 insulation properties we operate. Window 11 July 2026 to 7 October 2026, 90 days, ending on the last complete day of data. A query counts as cost-intent when it contains cost, price, per square, sq ft, how much, quote, or estimate. That matched 1,128 distinct queries and 12,311 impressions across 34 properties before filtering.
The bot filter, and why it matters. Rank-tracker bots inflate desktop impressions on lead-generation properties in this vertical. They appear at implausibly high positions on broad national queries and never click. We therefore restricted every figure on this page to MOBILE traffic, which those trackers largely do not generate. The filter removes 72% of raw cost-intent impressions and leaves 593 queries, 3,497 impressions and 28 markets.
The difference is not cosmetic, and we are publishing both so the effect is visible. On unfiltered data, “near me” looks like 18.8% of cost demand; on filtered data it is 2.5%. Attic looks like 37.9%; filtered, it is 60.3%. Unfiltered data also suggested most of this demand sat past position 20, when filtered data shows the opposite. Anyone running this analysis on raw Search Console exports in this vertical will reach wrong conclusions.
What this dataset is not. Google omits anonymized low-volume queries from query-level reports. These figures are therefore a sample of observed queries, not a census of all searches, and every share above is a share of observed cost-intent impressions. We do not present it as market share.
What we deliberately did not publish. We report aggregate shares and a market count only. We name no individual property, publish no per-site traffic or revenue figure, and do not identify which markets are client-owned.
Why there is no click-through rate here. Google’s omission of anonymized queries removes clicks as well as impressions, so a click-through curve built from query-level rows understates clicks severely. In our own check, the query-level pull returned 1,287 clicks across all 54 properties while 12 of those properties alone recorded 2,639 clicks in unfiltered reporting. Any position-by-position click-through rate from this data would be wrong, so we do not publish one.
Price data. Six independent contractor pages, fetched and read in full on 9 October 2026. Our own properties were excluded to avoid citing ourselves. We did not cite the large aggregator cost guides, because their pages returned HTTP 403 to our requests and we do not publish figures we could not retrieve from the source.
Refresh. Figures are rebuilt every January, with the prior year kept below as history. The URL carries no year.
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