How many calls go unanswered
About half of the calls to a home services business are answered by a person. Invoca's 2026 benchmark puts it at 52% for home services and 56% across all industries. Invoca built the benchmark from a dataset of more than 70 million calls across 10 industries. (Invoca, 2026)
The trade matters more than the average. Plumbing answers 74% of calls and pest control 73%. HVAC answers 34% and construction 32%. (Invoca Home Services, 2026)
Letting the phone ring longer raises the answer rate. For home services calls that ring longer than 15 seconds, 65% are answered. Past 30 seconds, it's 73%. Part of that is misdials and quick hang-ups dropping out of the count. (Invoca Home Services, 2026)
An earlier Invoca analysis found 27% of calls to home services businesses went unanswered. That 2024 figure measures calls with no answer at all, which is a narrower thing than "not answered by a person." (Invoca, 2024)
Nearly 1 in 8 calls to trade businesses comes in after hours. ServiceTitan data shows trades get 10.7% to 12.1% of their calls outside normal business hours, depending on the time of year. Data covers May 2025 to July 2026. (ServiceTitan)
What callers do when nobody answers
82% of consumers say they'll call a competitor if a business doesn't answer. CallRail surveyed 1,000 US adults and published the results in September 2025. (CallRail, 2025)
21% immediately call another business. Same survey. They don't wait or try again first. (CallRail, 2025)
78% say they've taken their business elsewhere after failing to reach a company by phone. (CallRail, 2025)
42% of consumers say they leave a voicemail. Under 3% actually do. The first number is what people told CallRail. The second is what Invoca sees in its call data for home services. When the two disagree, trust the behavior. (CallRail, 2025; Invoca, 2024)
24% turn to online chat instead. (CallRail, 2025)
41% hang up after one to two minutes on hold. 30% will wait three to five minutes. Only 18% will wait longer than five. (CallRail, 2025)
How fast businesses respond to leads
The average company took 42 hours to respond to a web lead. Researchers sent test leads to 2,241 US companies. That average counts only the companies that replied within 30 days. (Harvard Business Review, 2011)
23% of those companies never responded at all. 37% replied within an hour, 16% within one to 24 hours, and 24% took longer than a day. (Harvard Business Review, 2011)
Only 7% of 433 companies responded to a sales inquiry within five minutes. 55% didn't respond within five business days. This 2017 test by Drift (now part of Salesloft) covered B2B companies, not local services. (Salesloft)
54% of home improvement call centers reach new leads in under five minutes. 43% take longer. Hatch surveyed 124 US home improvement call centers with at least eight staff and published in January 2024. Hatch sells lead response software, and its sample includes its own customers. (Hatch, 2024)
57% of those call centers try a lead more than four times before calling it lost. For leads that already got a quote, only 14% follow up that often. 63% reach out once or twice. (Hatch, 2024)
How fast a lead goes cold
Firms that tried to reach a lead within an hour were nearly 7 times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited even one more hour. They were more than 60 times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited a day or longer. This comes from 1.25 million leads at 42 US companies. "Qualify" meant a real conversation with a decision maker. (Harvard Business Review, 2011)
The odds of reaching a lead are 100 times higher when you call in 5 minutes instead of 30. The odds of qualifying that lead are 21 times higher. James Oldroyd ran the study at MIT with InsideSales data. It covered more than 15,000 leads and 100,000 call attempts at six companies over three years, and was presented in 2007. (InsideSales/MIT)
What an answered call is worth
38% of answered calls to home services businesses are sales leads, and 45% of those leads book on the call. (Invoca Home Services, 2026)
The typical trade business booked 42% of its calls. ServiceTitan looked at more than 3,000 trade businesses in June 2022. (ServiceTitan, 2022)
Small shops book far fewer calls than big ones. Businesses with fewer than five technicians booked 24% of calls. Businesses with 25 or more booked 59%. (ServiceTitan, 2022)
For a shop with 5 to 14 technicians, every 5-point gain in booking rate is worth about $100,000 a year. That's ServiceTitan's own estimate. (ServiceTitan, 2022)
Popular numbers that don't hold up
These show up on dozens of pages. Here's what we found when we went looking for where they came from.
| The claim | Where it actually comes from | Our read |
|---|---|---|
| "85% of callers whose calls aren't answered never call back" | We found no study. Major vendor blogs state it with no link or source, for example Aircall. | Don't cite it. Use CallRail's measured 21% who immediately call someone else, or 82% who say they would. |
| "62% of calls to small businesses go unanswered" | A 411 Locals study published January 2016. It covered 85 businesses for 30 days: 37.8% answered, 37.8% went to voicemail, 24.3% got no response. | Real, but ten years old, small, and run by a marketing vendor. Invoca's 2026 benchmark is the better number. |
| "Businesses miss 22% of calls" | Numa cites a 2016 LinkedIn post by Liquid11, and notes it included businesses of every size. | Too thin to rely on. |
| "Calling within one minute raises conversions 391%" | Velocify's "Ultimate Contact Strategy" report, based on about 3.5 million leads. The copy of the report we found online has its numbers garbled, so we couldn't read the figure in the original. | Probably real, but we can't confirm the exact number. If you use it, say it's vendor data. |
What this means for a service business owner
Most of these numbers point the same way. Callers don't wait, they rarely leave a voicemail, and a lead loses most of its value within the first hour. The fix is usually not hiring another office person. It's making sure every missed call gets a text back within a minute, which is the first job in our guide to five jobs to hand an agent first.
Questions
What percentage of calls do small businesses miss?
The best current measure is Invoca's 2026 benchmark. Across home services, 52% of calls are answered by a person, so about half are not. Across all industries it's 56% answered. The widely quoted "62% of calls go unanswered" comes from a 2016 study of 85 businesses.
What is a good lead response time?
Under five minutes. The MIT and InsideSales study found the odds of reaching a lead were 100 times higher at five minutes than at 30. In Hatch's 2024 survey, 54% of home improvement call centers already reach new leads in under five minutes.
Do 85% of callers really never call back?
We couldn't find a study behind that number. It appears on many vendor blogs with no source. The closest measured figures are CallRail's 2025 survey, where 21% of consumers say they immediately call another business and 82% say they would call a competitor.
How many callers leave a voicemail?
It depends on whether you ask them or watch them. In CallRail's 2025 survey, 42% of consumers said they leave a voicemail. Invoca's call data shows under 3% of callers sent to voicemail actually leave one.