How much does a missed call cost your business?
A missed call costs you the expected value of the work you didn’t win. For a business with a £150 average job where about 30% of callers would have booked, that’s roughly £45 per missed call — and it adds up fast. Use the calculator below to see your own number.
Missed call cost calculator
Move the sliders to estimate what unanswered calls are costing your business each month and year.
Assumes about 30% of missed callers would have become customers. Adjust for your own conversion rate — this is an estimate, not a guarantee.
Estimated cost of your missed calls
£1,949
per month — about £23,400 a year
Illustrative estimate based on your inputs and a 30% conversion assumption. Your results will vary.
How to work out the cost of a missed call
The true cost of a missed call isn’t the call itself — it’s the work you lose because the caller went elsewhere. You can estimate it with three numbers:
Missed calls × conversion rate × average job value = lost revenue
Example: 10 missed calls a week × 30% who would have booked × £150 average job ≈ £450 a week, or about £1,900 a month.
It compounds because of how callers behave. Most won’t leave a voicemail and won’t try again — they ring the next business on the list. And the data on response speed is stark: leads contacted within five minutes are far more likely to convert than those left for even half an hour. See the full, sourced figures on our missed call statistics page.
What missed calls cost, by trade
| Business | Avg job value | Missed calls / week | Est. lost / month | Est. lost / year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electrician | £180 | 12 | £2,806 | £33,670 |
| Plumber | £150 | 14 | £2,728 | £32,735 |
| Hair salon | £45 | 20 | £1,169 | £14,029 |
| Estate agent | £900 | 8 | £9,353 | £112,234 |
| Garage / MOT | £220 | 15 | £4,287 | £51,440 |
Illustrative figures using a 30% conversion assumption. Adjust to your own numbers with the calculator above.
How to stop paying the missed-call tax
You can’t answer every call when you’re on a job, in a chair, or under a car — and you shouldn’t have to pay hundreds a month for a human answering service to cover it. Missed call text-back is the cheap, automatic fix: the moment you miss a call, the caller gets an instant SMS, an AI captures their enquiry, and a lead summary lands on your phone.
For most businesses, recovering a single job pays for the whole month. From £37/month with no contract, it turns the numbers above from a cost into recovered revenue — and it’s a fraction of the price of an answering service.
Cost of a missed call — common questions
Stop losing jobs to missed calls
Call2SMS texts back every missed caller in seconds and captures the enquiry — from £37/month, live within 24 hours.