Missed-call statistics for local businesses
The numbers behind the ringing phone, with their samples, their methods and their weaknesses. See also: missed-call text-back for plumbers. Last reviewed 27 July 2026, when we re-checked every source below by opening it.
What this page can and can’t support: every figure here is a measurement of some population that is not exactly your shop. Read them as a range and a direction, not a forecast. Where a source sells the remedy, we say so. Where the sample is small or the method undocumented, we say that too.
How often do home-services businesses never follow up?
In the most carefully run study we can find, the most common outcome after contacting a home-services business was no follow-up at all, 72% of the time. This is not a survey of opinions. Trained people posed as customers and counted what actually happened.
Source: Pied Piper Management Co., published 13 April 2026. 3,211 evaluations across 31 home-services brands, fieldwork October 2025 to January 2026. Staff posed as customers by phone, chat and web form, then tracked every follow-up channel for 24 hours against more than 20 weighted measures. Verbatim: "The most common follow-up experience was no follow-up at all, which occurred 72% of the time during the study." The same study found an appointment was offered only 28% of the time.
How many calls to small businesses go unanswered?
62% of calls to small businesses went unanswered in the most-cited measurement of the problem, from 2016. Treat this as the top of a range rather than a settled number: the sample is 85 businesses, the method is undocumented, and the company that published it sells booking and answering services to the businesses it measured.
Source: 411 Locals, 18 January 2016. 85 businesses across 58 industries over 30 days: 37.8% of calls answered live, 37.8% to voicemail, 24.3% no response at all. Two things worth noticing before you cite it. 85 businesses across 58 industries is about one and a half businesses per industry, so the breadth is the weakness rather than the strength. And "unanswered" bundles voicemail, which for a text-back product is a distinction that matters. We keep it because it is the most direct measurement of the whole question that anyone has published, not because it is the strongest.
How many home-services calls go unanswered on call-tracking data?
27% of calls to home-services businesses go unanswered, on far more recent data from a call-tracking platform. This is the low end of the range, and the gap between it and the 62% above is the honest state of the evidence.
Source: Invoca, 23 May 2024, from its own call-tracking data. Invoca does not publish a sample size for this figure. Its customers also tend to be larger and better staffed than a two-truck shop, so read this as a floor.
How many callers who reach voicemail leave a message?
Fewer than 3% of callers pushed to voicemail leave a message. Almost nobody is waiting for you to check it. They have already moved on to the next name.
Source: Invoca, 23 May 2024, verbatim: "less than 3% of callers who get pushed to voicemail leave a message." Own platform data, no sample size published, so read it as a direction rather than a precise rate.
Do people answer calls from unknown numbers?
Eight in ten Americans say they don’t generally answer their cellphone when an unknown number calls. That is the habit a callback from your shop is fighting. A text sits in a different queue and can be read without being answered.
Source: Pew Research Center, Colleen McClain, published 14 December 2020. 10,211 US adults on the American Trends Panel, a probability-based sample, fielded 13 to 19 July 2020. The strongest-sampled figure on this page by a wide margin. Pew also found 67% say they don’t answer unknown numbers but will check a voicemail if one is left, so voicemail is not useless, it is just slow.
How many of their calls do small shops turn into booked jobs?
Shops with fewer than five technicians booked 24% of their calls. Shops with 25 or more booked 59%. The gap is not skill, it is whether anyone is free to pick up the phone, and it is the clearest measurement of why this problem hits small operations hardest.
Source: ServiceTitan, published 25 October 2022, on June 2022 platform data from more than 3,000 trade businesses in the US and Canada. A typical shop booked 42% of calls. Note this measures calls converted to booked jobs, which is a different question from whether the phone was answered, and ServiceTitan sells software to these businesses.
How much does waiting an hour to respond cost you?
The odds of reaching a lead at all fall roughly tenfold once the first hour has passed, and the odds of qualifying one fall about sixfold. An hour is not fast.
Source: the Lead Response Management study by Prof. James Oldroyd using InsideSales.com data: more than fifteen thousand leads and more than a hundred thousand call attempts at six companies across three years. Two honest caveats. It measured B2B sales follow-up, not home-services jobs won, so the construct does not transfer cleanly. And the domain hosting it is being repurposed, so we have recorded the study’s details here in case the page disappears.
How much does a home-services lead cost in search advertising?
Advertisers in LocaliQ’s "Home & Home Improvement" category pay an average of $90.92 per lead in search advertising. Every missed call is a lead someone already paid for, whether that was you or the competitor who picked up.
Source: LocaliQ 2026 Search Advertising Benchmarks, updated 1 June 2026. Three caveats we would want if we were reading this. The figure comes from LocaliQ’s own client accounts rather than an independent panel. A "lead" there means a tracked conversion such as a form fill or a call, not a booked job. And "Home & Home Improvement" bundles retail with service contractors. We previously showed a range of $91 to $166 as though both came from this report. The $166 was never in it, in the current edition or the superseded one; it belongs to a different LocaliQ report, cited below.
How much does a lead cost by trade?
Ask by trade and the number moves a long way. General contractors pay $165.67 per lead, the third-dearest of the sixteen home-services trades LocaliQ breaks out. Roofers pay $228.15. A pool company pays $45.15.
Source: LocaliQ’s home-services search advertising benchmarks, updated 15 July 2026, a different report from the all-industry one above: "Construction & Contractors (General), $165.67." Roofing & Gutters $228.15, Doors & Windows Sales $200.34, Paint & Painting $138.38, Heating & Furnaces $129.02, Plumbing $129.02, Air Conditioning $127.74, Landscaping $117.92, Electricians $93.69, Handyman $54.05, Cleaning $46.99, Pools & Spas $45.15. This one publishes its method, which is why we prefer it for trade-level numbers: 3,211 US search campaigns from home-services businesses running 1 April 2024 to 21 March 2025, at least 103 active campaigns in every category, and the "averages" are medians so a few runaway accounts can’t drag them. Same two caveats as above apply, LocaliQ’s own client accounts and a "lead" that isn’t a booked job, plus a third: the report is titled 2025 while carrying a July 2026 update date, so the fieldwork is older than the date on the page suggests.
Why the numbers disagree
You will see missed-call rates quoted anywhere from 14% to 62%, and all of them can be technically correct at once. Three things drive the spread.
The first is what counts as a miss. Invoca asks whether a human actually picked up. Others count only calls that reached voicemail or were detected as abandoned, which is a narrower definition and produces a smaller number. The second is who is being measured. Call-tracking platforms measure their own paying customers, who are by definition organized enough to have bought call tracking, so they skew larger and better staffed than an owner-operator with a phone in a truck. The third is spam. Nobody in this field consistently strips robocalls, which inflates any raw missed-call count.
Our read: the true rate for the smallest operations sits at the high end, and the platform figures are floors rather than refutations. If you want a number for your shop, the only honest source is last week’s missed-call list with the obvious spam deleted.
Numbers we won’t print
Every page in this category, including earlier versions of this one, repeats figures that fall apart when you follow them. We traced them, and here is what we found, so you can stop repeating them too. The full trace, with each chain followed to its end and a methodology a skeptic can repeat, is published as The Folklore Audit.
"85% of missed callers never call back." There is no study. We found eleven mutually contradictory attributions, several to reports that do not exist. The deepest chain terminates in an unsourced sentence in a 2016 vendor blog post; the rest go nowhere at all. We used to show this figure and we have removed it.
"78% of jobs go to whoever responds first." Attributed across the industry to a "Lead Connect survey" that has no published report, sample or method. It does not appear in the Lead Response Management study it is usually pinned to, which we read. We used to show this figure too, credited to that study, and that was our mistake.
"98% of texts are opened" and "90% are read within three minutes." Both come from a single 2010 white paper by Mobilesquared, whose author notes the 90% figure became "the most used stat in mobile marketing and messaging." In August 2022 Mobilesquared withdrew both, writing that "neither datapoints represent an accurate reflection of today’s world of mobile messaging," and now puts the read rate at 55%.
Any share of calls said to arrive after hours. The 42% to 48% family of claims has no primary source we could locate. Several trails end at studies that do not exist, including one attributed to a trade magazine survey of 1,200 HVAC professionals that the magazine never published.
What the numbers mean together
A large share of calls to small businesses go unanswered, and the smaller the shop the larger that share. Almost nobody leaves a voicemail. Most people won’t pick up for a number they don’t recognize, so calling back later is fighting a habit. And the odds of reaching someone collapse inside the first hour. None of that needs the inflated figures this field likes to trade in.
What it costs your shop depends on your ticket and how many calls you actually miss. Run your own numbers →
What to do about it
When your line rings out, BeepBack texts the caller back in seconds, in your business’s name. It asks what they need, how soon, and where, so the job that was headed to the next name on the list stays yours. How it works →
Five different kinds of company sell missed-call text-back, and what you get from each varies more than the prices do. Missed-call text-back software, side by side →
Citing these numbers? Link this page or the sources above, and please check them yourself; that is the whole point. Each figure is dated to the edition we read. We re-open every source when we review this page and we note what changed.
Somewhere out there tomorrow, a phone rings at 2:14.
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