What a Signed SSDI Case Really Costs, and How to Work Out Your Own Number
Cost per lead is the wrong metric. Here is the worksheet for cost per signed SSDI retainer, including the intake labor most firms forget to count.
Most disability firms I talk to can tell me what they pay for a lead. Very few can tell me what they pay for a signed retainer, and almost none can tell me what they pay for a case that eventually gets paid. Those three numbers are wildly different, and only the last one has anything to do with whether the marketing is working.
Here is how to build the number properly. Use your own figures. I am deliberately not going to hand you industry averages to plug in, because the averages hide the exact variation that determines whether a channel is profitable for you specifically.
The four conversion gates
Every acquisition channel runs a claimant through four gates, and each one has its own leak.
Gate one, lead to contact. Of the leads you receive, what share do you actually get on the phone? This is the gate most firms lose the most at and measure the least. It is driven almost entirely by speed and persistence, not by lead quality.
Gate two, contact to qualified. Of the people you speak to, what share meet your criteria? Insured status, date last worked, substantial gainful activity, treatment history, and whether they are already represented.
Gate three, qualified to signed. Of qualified claimants, what share sign a retainer with you rather than the next firm that calls?
Gate four, signed to paid. Of signed cases, what share ultimately produce a fee? This is where the Social Security Administration's own outcome data becomes your planning tool, because it tells you what proportion of applicants are eventually awarded benefits and at which stage.
The worksheet
Run this per channel, not in aggregate. Aggregate numbers average a good channel and a bad channel into a mediocre one and tell you nothing.
A Media or lead spend for the period $ ______
B Leads received ______
C Cost per lead A / B $ ______
D Leads contacted ______
E Contact rate D / B ____%
F Qualified after screening ______
G Signed retainers ______
H Signed rate from leads G / B ____%
I Cost per signed retainer A / G $ ______
J Expected share of signed cases paid ____%
K Cost per paid case I / J $ ______
L Average fee per paid case $ ______
M Contribution per paid case L - K $ ______
If M is negative, the channel is losing money no matter how attractive C looked.
The line everyone forgets
Intake labor. If an intake specialist costs you twenty five dollars an hour fully loaded and spends an average of forty minutes across all attempts on each lead, that is roughly seventeen dollars of labor per lead, on top of the acquisition cost. On a channel producing cheap, low-intent leads, the labor can quietly exceed the media cost. This is the mechanism by which a five dollar lead ends up more expensive per signed case than a fifty five dollar one.
Add a line to the worksheet:
N Intake minutes per lead ______
O Loaded intake cost per hour $ ______
P Intake cost per lead (N / 60) x O $ ______
Q True cost per signed retainer (A + (P x B)) / G $ ______
Q is the number to manage. Not C.
What the fee side looks like
On the revenue side, an SSDI representative fee is the lesser of twenty five percent of past-due benefits or the statutory cap, which the Social Security Administration raised to 9,200 dollars effective November 30, 2024. That structure has two consequences for acquisition math that people miss.
First, your revenue per case is largely determined by how long the claim takes, because backpay accrues over the wait. A case won at the hearing level after a long wait is usually worth substantially more than one allowed on initial application. That is uncomfortable but it is arithmetic.
Second, because the fee is capped, you cannot buy your way out of a bad cost structure with a bigger case. There is a ceiling. Your entire margin has to come from the acquisition and conversion side.
The test I would run first
Take your two largest channels. Compute Q for each over the last ninety days. Most firms discover that the channel they believe is cheapest is second or third once intake labor and contact rates are included, and that the channel they were about to cut is the one carrying the practice.
Then, and only then, look at cost per lead again. It becomes a useful number the moment it sits underneath a signed-case number, and a misleading one whenever it stands alone.