What Annuity Appointments Cost in 2026, and Why the Range Is So Wide

Ask five companies what an annuity appointment costs and the answers will not be close to each other. We have seen $200 quoted with ad spend included, and we know producers paying $1,800 for the same word.

Nobody is necessarily lying. They are selling different things under one label. Here is what actually moves the price.

The four variables

What is being delivered. A contact record, a calendar entry, or a person in front of you. Three products, and this alone accounts for most of the spread.

How deep the filter goes. Assets, timing, product fit, decision makers. Every filter you add removes people, and removing people costs the vendor money, which shows up in the price.

Exclusivity. A prospect sold to one producer costs more to produce than one sold to three. Obviously. The question is whether anyone has told you which you are getting.

Who does the confirming. A text reminder is cheap. A human being calling the day before, and again the morning of, is not. Someone pays for those calls either way, and if the vendor is not paying for them, your calendar is.

The ladder, roughly

Leads, around $20 to $300. At the bottom, recycled lists. At the top, exclusive real time enquiries from people who actually have assets. You do the dialing, the qualifying, the booking, and you absorb every no show.

Booked appointments, around $300 to $600. Someone else sets the meeting. The vendor is paid when it is booked, which means a booking that only happens half the time is quietly twice its sticker price.

Shown appointments, around $600 to $1,800. You are billed when the person turns up. Highest sticker, and the only model where the sticker is the real number, because there is no second calculation hiding behind it.

The reason that top band reaches $1,800 is usually filter depth. Narrow the criteria far enough and the cost to produce one appointment climbs steeply, because you are discarding most of the traffic you paid for.

What a very low price usually means

If someone quotes you well under $500 for a shown appointment with advertising included, that is worth examining rather than celebrating, because it is close to what the thing costs to produce.

In practice there are a few explanations, and it is usually a mix.

They are booked, not shown, and the word got blurred somewhere in the conversation.

The filter is soft. No real asset minimum, or an asset question nobody checks, which means your meetings include people with $60,000 in a savings account.

The appointments come from outbound dialing on purchased data rather than people who raised their hand. That is a legitimate way to produce meetings, and it produces a colder person than someone who found you and booked themselves.

Or they are buying market share and subsidising the price, in which case enjoy it while it lasts.

None of that makes a cheap vendor a bad choice. It makes them a different choice, and you should know which one you are making.

What a high price should buy you

If you are paying at the top of the range, the things you should be getting in return are specific.

A filter with teeth, including a stated asset minimum and a documented list of who gets rejected. Exclusivity in writing. Human confirmation rather than an automated text. Something handed to you before the meeting so you are not starting cold. And a clear answer on what happens when somebody does not show.

A premium price with none of that attached is just a premium price.

The number that actually decides it

All of this converges on one figure, which is what you pay to sit in front of a retiree with money to move.

Take the unit price, work out how many units it takes you to get one of those meetings, and add the hours you spent. If working leads costs you ten hours a week and your time in front of clients is worth something, those hours are part of the price whether or not they appear on an invoice.

Run it once with your own numbers. Most producers never have, which is why a cheap lead keeps looking like a better deal than a meeting that happens.

What we charge, in the open

$1,000 per qualified shown appointment. No retainer, no advertising spend on your side, no long term contract. If the retiree does not turn up, you are not billed, because we are the ones who paid to produce them.

We publish it for the same reason we publish our criteria. A producer comparing vendors deserves a number to compare against, and a company that will not give you one before a sales call is telling you something.

Two questions that expose any quote

Is that booked or shown, and what happens when they do not show?

What is the asset minimum, and what do you do with the people who fail it?

Everything else is detail. A vendor who answers both in specifics is worth your time at almost any price. A vendor who answers in adjectives is expensive at any price.