How to count what a missed call costs your business

You have seen the ads: a dollar figure for every missed call, a share of callers who never try again. The numbers are big, and most of them are there to sell you a phone product.

You can count your own instead. It takes your call history, a pen and an evening.

The honest formula

Three numbers, multiplied:

Calls nobody returned × share that would have booked × profit per job = what the leak costs you

Take them one at a time.

Calls nobody returned. Not every call that rings out is lost. Some are spam or wrong numbers. Some callers try again and reach you. Some you call back and book. Count only real customers that nobody called back.

Share that would have booked. Some callers want a price over the phone, and some are outside your area. Use your own booking rate if you track it.

If you do not, a study of more than 3,000 trade businesses found they booked 42 percent of calls on average, and 24 percent at shops with fewer than 5 technicians (ServiceTitan, 2022, vendor data, US and Canada). If you are not sure, use the lower number.

Source: ServiceTitan, call booking rates by trade and shop size, 2022. Vendor data, more than 3,000 businesses in the US and Canada.

Profit per job. Use what you keep after parts and labor. A lost job costs you the profit you would have made, not the whole ticket.

Here is how it looks with the numbers from our sample sheet, which uses the 24 percent small shops booked at all hours in the study. Say your call history shows 14 calls after hours last month. You called 3 back. That leaves 11. At 24 percent, that is 2.64 jobs, and at $151 profit a job, $399 a month.

Your numbers will be different.

Why the big figures do not fit

We tried to trace the most shared missed-call numbers back to a study. One is repeated from blog to blog with no study behind it at all. One comes from a vendor blog’s worked example: an imagined shop taking 5,000 ad calls a month and selling furnace jobs.

The per-call figure people quote is not even on that page. Another comes from a 2016 survey, now credited to a company that did not run it. We keep all of them off our sheets.

Even the measured numbers disagree, because they count different things. One report found 27 percent of calls to home service businesses were not answered (Invoca, 2024, vendor data).

A later report found only 52 percent of calls to home service businesses reached a person (Invoca, 2026, vendor data). Both come from a company that sells call tools, and neither measured your shop.

• 27%of calls to home service businesses were not answered

  Source: Invoca, what missed calls cost home service businesses, 2024. Vendor data.

• 52%of calls to home service businesses reached a person

  Source: Invoca, Home Services Lead Conversion Benchmarks Report, 2026. Vendor data, averages across Invoca’s customers.

Two more reasons to count your own:

• Big shops are not your shop. The best measured study of after-hours calls comes from AC shops large enough to run per-technician software. There, 14.1 percent of calls came after hours in June, against 9.8 percent in October (ServiceTitan, 2026, vendor data). At a 3-truck shop, the bigger leak may be at 2 p.m., when whoever answers the phone is under a sink.
• Months differ. Heat, storms and UF move-in weeks change how often the phone rings. One month is a snapshot, not a year.

Source: ServiceTitan, the summer after-hours call spike in residential AC, 2026 (2025 data). Vendor data.

What to pull from your phone company

Your phone company keeps a history of your calls: the date and time, the caller’s number, how long the call lasted and whether anyone picked up. That history is all you need.

It shows that a call happened, not what was said, so it is not a recording. Do not record calls to get this number. Florida law needs everyone’s consent to record a call.

Where to find it:

• A business line. Log in to the account online and look for call history, call logs or call details. Download the past 30 days. If you cannot find it, call the company and ask what it keeps.
• A cell phone. If shop calls ring your cell, your carrier’s online account may show the history. The phone’s own recent-calls list may not reach back a full month.
• No history at all. Count by hand for two weeks. Tape a sheet by the phone and write one line for every missed call.

Our article on how to get 30 days of call history from your phone company has the steps for AT&T, Cox, Verizon, T-Mobile and Quo.

What to mark on the list:

• Very short calls with no voicemail. Many are spam or hang-ups. Check the number before you count it.
• Numbers that called twice. The second call may have reached you.
• Calls after hours and on weekends. Mark them apart from calls missed at 2 p.m. They need a different fix.
• Call-backs. Which calls got one, and how long it took.

Then run the formula on the calls that are left.

What the number is not

Some callers had already hired someone else by the time you would have called. That is why our sample sheet shows the formula on every line, so you can argue with any number on it.

If your number comes out small, that is good news. Your phone is not the leak, and the money is somewhere else: quotes that go out late, or the same job typed three times.

Try it with your own numbers

Our loss calculator runs this formula on your phone or computer and sends us nothing. If you want the real count, call or text us for a free call.

Sources, in plain words

• ServiceTitan, call booking rates by trade and shop size, 2022. Vendor data, more than 3,000 businesses in the US and Canada. https://www.servicetitan.com/blog/data-call-booking-rates
• ServiceTitan, the summer after-hours call spike in residential AC, 2026 (2025 data). Vendor data. https://www.servicetitan.com/toolbox/state-of-the-trades/trends/hvac-summer-after-hours-call-spike
• Invoca, what missed calls cost home service businesses, 2024. Vendor data. https://www.invoca.com/blog/how-much-missed-sales-calls-cost-home-services-businesses
• Invoca, Home Services Lead Conversion Benchmarks Report, 2026. Vendor data, averages across Invoca’s customers. https://www.invoca.com/reports/the-invoca-home-services-lead-conversion-benchmarks-report-2026
• Florida Statutes, section 934.03, on recording calls. http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0900-0999/0934/Sections/0934.03.html
• Lumora research, 2026: our check of the most shared missed-call figures against their sources.

Read next

• How to get 30 days of call history from your phone companyCarrier by carrier, where a Gainesville shop downloads the past 30 days of calls, and one pass through the file to find the calls nobody returned.
• Answering service or text-back: what each costs you, and what each records in FloridaFour prices read on the vendors’ own pages, and what each product keeps of your calls under Florida’s recording law.