What are missed calls worth to you?
Two numbers, and we’ll show you roughly how much paid work goes to someone else each month because a call reached nobody.
Work it out
Put in your own numbers. The 140 calls a month we start with is only an example, not a measured figure. The other numbers come from the sources below.
Paid work you may be missing each month
Up to $15,808
a month · 38 of them reach nobody · about $416 of paid work each
That’s the high end. It uses figures from contractors who track their ads closely. Your number is probably lower.
Where the numbers come from
Callers who wait and still reach nobody, 27%: Invoca’s 2026 home-services benchmarks. Its answer rates for calls over 15 and over 30 seconds put the share of callers who wait and still reach nobody between 27% and 35%, and we take the low end, the same as our Google ads calculator (27%). The better-known 48% counts every caller, including people who hang up after a ring or two. We don’t use it here, because the paid-work figure below only counts callers who waited.
Paid work per call, $416: SearchLight’s February 2026 Google Local Services Ads study of 888 contractors. On average, each call or message from their ads turned into $416 of paid work. That already allows for the callers who never booked and the bookings that never paid, so we don’t guess how many would have booked. (Multiplying the booking rate by the average job instead counts every booking as a paid job, and nearly doubles the answer.) More in this post.
Average job, $1,826: the same study’s average bill, when the customer paid. If you put in your own average job, we scale the $416 by the same ratio: about 23 cents of paid work per call for every dollar of your average job. Its contractors track their ads closely, so your own numbers are probably lower.
New-customer calls a month, 140: an example to start from, not a sourced figure. Count people calling to ask for work, not existing customers checking on a job, suppliers or spam. The paid-work figure comes from calls like those, so counting every call would overstate the answer.