01How many calls go unanswered
CallRail's January 2025 benchmark put the missed-call rate for home services at 14%, against 32% in healthcare and 28% in legal.
Invoca's July 2026 report is stricter about what counts as answered. Across home services, 52% of calls reached a person. For calls longer than 15 seconds, which drops misdials and quick hang-ups, it was 65%, and for calls over 30 seconds, 73%.
The two don't contradict each other. They count different calls in different ways, so read them as a range: somewhere between one call in seven and one in two doesn't reach a person.
02How fast you need to call back
Harvard Business Review looked at how 2,241 US companies answered web leads in 2011. Firms that tried to reach a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited an hour longer, and 23% of the companies never responded at all. The study covers web leads in general, not trades.
For movers there's a trade number. In SmartMoving's 2026 State of Moving Report, a survey of 484 movers, 38% replied to a lead within five minutes.
03The value of one job
| Trade | One job | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Moving | $1,692 for an average local move, most between $879 and $2,543 | Angi, April 2025 |
| Water damage restoration | $1,305 to $5,707 for most jobs | Bob Vila, citing Angi and HomeAdvisor, May 2023 |
| Garage doors | Your service call fee plus the repair | No national figure we trust yet, so use your own average ticket |
04Work out your own number
Take your calls a week, the share you miss, the share of those callers who would have booked and what a job is worth. Multiply them, then multiply by 4.3 for a month.
A moving company with 40 calls a week that misses 14% has about 5.6 missed calls a week. If one in five would have booked a $1,692 local move, that's about $1,900 a week, or roughly $8,100 a month. The booking rate is our example. Use your own.
The calculator on our demo page does the same sum with your numbers.
05Numbers you'll see elsewhere, and why we don't use them
- The line that 62% of calls go unanswered comes from a 2016 study of 85 businesses across 58 industries. That's too small and too old to stand for home services in 2026.
- CallRail's release says up to 85% of callers who don't get through never call back, but we couldn't find the study behind the number.
- We couldn't find any source for the claim that fewer than 3% of callers leave a voicemail.
- We couldn't find where the figure of 41% of moves happening between May and August comes from either.
06Fixing it
- Answer after hours and when the line is busy, with a person, a service or a desk.
- Call web leads back within minutes.
- Get emergencies to whoever is on call as they come in.
See how our desk handles it for moving companies, water damage restoration and garage door companies, or compare the options in Automated front desk vs answering service.