Guide for US plumbing shops
How many calls do plumbers miss?
You'll see a lot of confident percentages online. Most don't trace back to a study. Here's what the sources we could verify say, and how to get your own number, which beats any benchmark.
What published sources say
- 411 Locals (2016): monitored calls to 85 businesses in 58 industries for 30 days. 37.8% answered, 37.8% went to voicemail, 24.3% had no response. That’s 62% not answered by a person.
- CallRail (2025): survey of 1,000 US consumers. When a business doesn’t answer, 42% say they leave a voicemail and 21% say they immediately call another business.
What these numbers don’t tell you
- Neither is plumbing-specific. Neither is a peer-reviewed study.
- The 411 Locals sample is small and from 2016.
- CallRail’s figures are what people say they do, not recorded behavior.
- The widely repeated “80% of callers won’t leave a voicemail” claim: we couldn’t find a study behind it, so we don’t use it.
Measure your own missed-call rate this week
- Pull your call log from your phone carrier or VoIP portal for the last 7 or 30 days.
- Count total inbound calls and calls marked missed or sent to voicemail.
- Split by time: business hours, evenings, weekends.
- Call back a sample of missed numbers that never left a voicemail and note how many already hired someone.
Plug your weekly missed calls into the plumber missed-call cost calculator to turn the count into dollars.
Cheap ways to miss fewer calls
- Set up a voicemail greeting that asks for the address and the problem.
- Use call forwarding on rings-no-answer to a second phone.
- Auto-text missed callers so they have a way to reach you that isn’t voicemail (what PlumbPing is being built to do).