Adel AtyaNobody can tell you how many calls your plumbing business misses, because published numbers range from 14% to nearly half of all calls, depending on what counts as "missed". The useful answer is your own number, and it takes about twenty minutes to get.
Below: what the published data actually says, why it disagrees with itself, and how to turn your own missed calls into a dollar figure.
What do the studies say?
Two large datasets give very different answers, and both are honest about their method.
- CallRail, in a January 2025 report built on 1.1 million leads, found home services businesses missed 14% of calls. It counts calls that ended within 15 seconds as "abandoned", not missed, so those are left out.
- Invoca, in its 2026 Home Services Benchmarks report, found a person answered only 52% of inbound home services calls. Leave out calls of 15 seconds or less and that rises to 65%.
Both companies sell call-tracking software, so they have a stake in the topic. Neither measures plumbers alone. And you will see a lot of blog posts quoting "62% of calls go unanswered". That figure traces back to a 2016 study of just 85 businesses, so I would not build a decision on it.
The honest summary: somewhere between one call in seven and one call in two does not reach a person at a typical home-services business. Where you sit depends on how many trucks you run, whether the owner picks up while on a job, and what your phone does after hours.
Why does the number vary so much?
A "missed call" is not one thing. Your phone log mixes together:
- Rings nobody answered while the crew was on a job.
- Calls that went to voicemail and ended there.
- Wrong numbers, spam and sales calls that you would never want to answer.
- After-hours calls, which are often the most urgent ones.
A tracker that counts all four will show a scary rate. One that filters out short calls will show a gentler one. For pricing purposes, only the real customer calls matter, and only you can sort those.
What does voicemail actually catch?
Less than owners hope. Moneypenny's 2016 small business call report found that 69% of callers who reached voicemail hung up without leaving a message. Moneypenny sells answering services, so treat the exact figure with care, but the direction matches what most owners see in their own inbox: a handful of messages, and a lot of missed rings with no trace.
Even if today's figure is lower than that 2016 number, voicemail is a net with large holes in it. The caller you never hear from has usually already dialled the next plumber on the list.
What is one missed call worth?
Pricing guides disagree because prices differ by city and job. Inch Calculator puts the national average plumber service call at about $300, with a typical range of $150 to $500. Housecall Pro lists emergency dispatch fees of roughly $150 to $350 or more, billed on top of the repair.
Use your own average ticket, not those. Pull your last 50 completed jobs and divide total revenue by 50. That is the value of one booked call. Then adjust for two things:
- Not every missed call was a job. Assume a share were spam, wrong numbers or price shoppers.
- Emergency calls are worth more than the average, and they are the ones most likely to go to the second plumber, because the caller needs someone now.
A worked example (with made-up numbers on purpose)
These figures are an illustration, not a result from any client. Plug in your own.
- You get 40 real customer calls a week.
- You miss 20% of them, so 8 calls.
- Half of those callers would have booked, so 4 jobs.
- Your average ticket is $350.
That is $1,400 a week, or roughly $5,600 a month, going to someone else. Cut the miss rate in half and the figure is still around $2,800. Now change the inputs. At 10 calls a week, a 10% miss rate and a $200 ticket, the loss is about $100 a week, and no phone agent will be worth paying for.
That second case matters. If you are a solo operator with a quiet phone, a missed-call text-back is probably enough.
How to measure your own number this week
- Export seven days of call logs from your carrier, your phone app or Google Business Profile.
- Mark each unanswered call: real customer, or noise? Call the numbers back to check.
- Count after-hours calls separately, evenings and weekends.
- Check how many left a voicemail, and how many of those you returned within an hour.
- Multiply real missed customers by your booking rate and average ticket.
Do it for two weeks if you can, and include a busy one. Averages hide the Monday after a cold snap.
What actually fixes it?
In order of cost:
- Answer faster yourself. Move the phone to whoever is closest to it. Free, and limited by a human's day.
- Missed-call text-back. When a call goes unanswered, the caller gets a text within seconds. In our Blue Ridge demo the text goes out in 8 seconds and an AI callback follows in 52. It recovers part of the loss and costs little.
- An AI phone agent that answers every call in about a second, takes the job details and books into your calendar. It can handle two calls at once, at 2am as well as 2pm.
- A human answering service. It works, but it usually takes messages instead of booking jobs.
An AI agent cannot diagnose a leak, and it should not be left alone with a gas-smell call. Ours is built to hand those to a person on your on-call number, and we test that handoff on purpose before any agent goes live.
Checklist
- Export a week of call logs and sort real customers from noise.
- Count after-hours calls on their own line.
- Work out your average ticket from your last 50 jobs.
- Multiply: missed real calls × booking rate × average ticket.
- If the monthly number is above a few hundred dollars, look at what an AI receptionist costs and the published pricing.
- Call our demo agent and see what a missed-call recovery feels like from the caller's side.
The plumbing and HVAC page shows the specific calls an agent handles in your trade.