GOOGLE ADS COST-PER-CLICK STUDY · OCTOBER 2026
We pulled Google’s current top-of-page bid estimates for two exact phrases, “personal injury lawyer” and “car accident lawyer,” in all 50 states and the 3 largest cities in each. Here’s what it costs to land at the top of the ads where you practice.
Optimize My Firm | 50 states and 150 cities | Google Ads Keyword Planner data pulled October 24, 2026
National top-of-page bid for “personal injury lawyer”
National top-of-page bid for “car accident lawyer”
Highest state bid for “personal injury lawyer” (Kansas and Louisiana)
Highest state bid for “car accident lawyer” (Alabama, Nevada and Wisconsin)
Free to share with credit to Optimize My Firm.
Switch between the two phrases, click a state to see its 3 largest cities, or sort the full 50-state table.
| State | PI lawyer top-of-page bid |
PI lawyer avg. CPC |
PI lawyer monthly searches |
Car accident top-of-page bid |
Car accident avg. CPC |
Car accident monthly searches |
|---|
Click any column header to sort. A dash means Google didn’t return enough ad data for that market. Source: Google Ads Keyword Planner via DataForSEO, October 24, 2026. Study by Optimize My Firm.
All figures come from Google Ads Keyword Planner, retrieved through the DataForSEO API on October 24, 2026. We requested exact-match data for “personal injury lawyer” and “car accident lawyer” for the United States, all 50 states, Washington, D.C. and the 3 most populous cities in each state.
Google groups close variants together. When Google reported a phrase’s numbers under its “attorney” version (for example, “car accident attorney”), we used that grouped figure.
Top-of-page bid (high) is Google’s estimate of what advertisers have paid to appear above the organic results. It’s the main number on the map. Average CPC is Google’s historical average cost per click. Monthly searches is Google’s rounded search estimate.
These are Google’s estimates, not actual invoices. What a firm pays depends on its bids, Quality Score, ad schedule and competition at that moment. Small markets can produce volatile or missing numbers. Several markets report a high bid of exactly $1,000, so treat those as rounded estimates. Where a city’s top bid matches its state’s, Google may be reporting state-level data for that city. All dollar figures are rounded to the nearest dollar.
Boundaries: U.S. Census Bureau via us-atlas. Data: Google Ads Keyword Planner via DataForSEO.