Missed call statistics for contractorsHow many calls to contractors go unanswered? Here's every number, and where it came from.
You've seen "74%," "62%," "27%" and a dozen other figures quoted as fact. We went back to the original sources for every one we could find. Here's what each one actually measured.
The short version: no independent study of unanswered calls to home service businesses exists. Every published figure comes from a company that sells call tracking, call answering, or lead generation. They range from about 14% to about 48%, and most don't disclose how they were measured.
The published figures, side by side
Each bar is one published unanswered-call rate. The shading shows how much of the method the publisher disclosed. Green means sample and method are stated, amber means partly stated, red means not stated.
Every source, with its method
Every publisher below sells a product related to phone calls, so each has a stake in the answer. That doesn't make the numbers wrong. It's a reason to look at how they were measured.
| Figure | Source | What it measured | Method | Seller of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 34% | Service Direct, 2019 report | Calls answered by in-house staff at home service businesses (66% answered). 1,000 randomly sampled recorded calls, 94 US businesses, 42 categories; the calls date from 2017. | Disclosed | Pay-per-call leads |
| 27% | Invoca, 2024 · 2023 | Calls to home services businesses not answered. Described as Invoca platform data. | Not disclosed No sample size, period or definition. | Call tracking, AI call handling |
| ~48% | Invoca, 2026 benchmark | Implied from a 52% answer rate for home services, across a 70M+ call dataset spanning 10 industries. Contradicts Invoca's earlier 27%. | Partly Total calls stated; home-services count and period not. | Call tracking, AI call handling |
| 18% / 41% | Invoca, 2025; repeated in a ServiceTitan webinar recap (2023) | Home services calls unanswered on weekdays (18%) and weekends (41%). Often cited as ServiceTitan's; it appears to be Invoca's. | Not disclosed | Call tracking / field-service software |
| 28% | CallRail, 2025 | All calls to businesses, all industries. Footnoted as data from participants in a CallRail beta program. | Partly Self-selected group; no sample size. | Call tracking, AI answering |
| 14% | CallRail SMB benchmark, 2025 | Missed-call rate for home services in a 1.1M-conversation small-business benchmark. We confirmed this figure only via syndicated copies of the release. | Partly | Call tracking, AI answering |
| 62% | 411 Locals, 2016 (original not located) | 85 small businesses across 58 industries over 30 days; only about 38% reached a live person. Counts voicemail as unanswered. Often misdated as recent. | Not verifiable No primary source found. | Call answering, local SEO |
| 74.1% | NextPhone | Calls to home services businesses unanswered. Widely repeated with sample details (130,175 calls, 45 businesses) that do not appear on the pages we could open. | Not disclosed Treat as unverified. | AI receptionist |
Voicemail: does it catch the calls you miss?
Fewer than 3% of callers sent to voicemail leave a message, according to Invoca's platform data. Two cautions: the figure covers callers who reached voicemail, not all callers, and it isn't specific to home services. As with Invoca's other figures, the method isn't disclosed.
Speed to lead: what the famous study actually found
The "respond within 5 minutes" advice traces to the 2007 Lead Response Management study by Dr. James Oldroyd (then at MIT Sloan) and InsideSales.com. It found the odds of qualifying a lead fell about 21 times between a 5-minute and a 30-minute response. (archived study · 2014 follow-up)
What it measured: companies calling back web-form leads, mostly B2B, across six companies and about 15,000 leads. It wasn't peer-reviewed. It says nothing directly about homeowners phoning a contractor and moving on when nobody answers. The intuition carries over, but the number doesn't.
How to read these numbers
- Definitions differ. Some sources count voicemail as "unanswered," some don't, and most don't say.
- Samples aren't contractors like you. Platform data comes from each vendor's own customers, who already invest in phone tracking. That probably isn't the typical one-truck shop.
- Vendors publish the numbers that sell. An answering-service company has a reason to find a high miss rate. That's why we've labeled each source.
- Where we've landed: on our own pages we use the best-documented figure, Service Direct's: about 1 in 3 calls went unanswered in a review of 1,000 recorded calls.
Disclosure
First Call sells a missed-call text-back service for contractors, so we're a vendor in this space too. That's why we've linked every source and labeled what each one disclosed: check them yourself. Once First Call has enough volume, we plan to publish our own call data, with the method in full.
Citing this page
You're welcome to cite this roundup. Please link to the original source for any individual figure.
Found a primary source we missed, or a figure we got wrong? Email support@getfirstcall.app and we'll update the page.
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