You paid for the lead. Then you missed the call.

The finding

14–27%

of calls to home-service businesses go unanswered, depending on whose data you use. Phone leads in home services convert at 46% on the call.

Missed-call rates: 14% (CallRail, 2025) to 27% (Invoca). Phone conversion: 46% (Invoca, 2025).

Wasted acquisition spend

Formula: wasted_spend = paid leads per month × share that arrive by phone × missed-call rate × cost per lead. Defaults: 50 paid leads per month (assumption), 54% arrive by phone (one contractor, S5; adjustable), missed-call rate 14% (CallRail, 2025) or 27% (Invoca), cost per lead from LocaliQ 2025.

CPL: LocaliQ, 2025 Search Ad Benchmarks for Home Services (3,211 U.S. campaigns, April 2024 to March 2025). Missed-call rate: CallRail (2025) or Invoca. Leads per month is an adjustable assumption. Phone share defaults to 54% (one contractor, S5) and is adjustable.

Why it happens

Owners and lead techs are on the job, not near a phone. When a call goes to voicemail, it rarely comes back as a message: Invoca's platform data shows fewer than 3% of callers sent to voicemail leave one (Invoca, 2024).

Homeowners don't keep office hours either. At one contractor, more than 6 in 10 online inquiries arrived outside Monday to Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday was the busiest day of the week for them (S5). That figure measures web inquiries, not phone calls.

The bigger loss is the job

Wasted ad spend is the smaller cost of a missed call. The larger one is the sale that call would have become. At one contractor, leads who called in became kept sales 11.6% of the time (S5, September 2023 to August 2025), and callers produced more than 6 in 10 of that contractor's signed sales.

lost_jobs_per_month = paid leads per month × share by phone × missed-call rate × close rate. lost_sales_per_month = lost_jobs_per_month × average job value. At the defaults: 0.8 jobs a month (10.1 a year) at 27%; 0.4 jobs a month (5.3 a year) at 14%.

Methodology

wasted_spend = paid leads per month × share that arrive by phone × missed-call rate × cost per lead. Paid leads per month is an assumption; share that arrive by phone is a 54% default from S5, adjustable; close rate is an 11.6% default from S5, adjustable; average job value is the reader’s own number. Missed-call rates come from two call-analytics platforms that measure different customer bases, so we show both rather than average them.

Sources

1. Invoca, "See How Much Missed Sales Calls Cost Home Services Businesses," May 23, 2024 — 27% of calls to home services businesses are not answered. Fewer than 3% of callers sent to voicemail leave a message (Invoca platform data).
2. CallRail, "From conversations to conversions: How small businesses can market smarter," January 14, 2025 (1.1 million conversations) — Home services missed-call rate: 14%
3. Invoca, Call Conversion Industry Benchmarks Report, 2025 (June 10, 2025; 60+ million calls) — Home services phone leads: 46% convert on the call. All-industry average: 37%.
4. LocaliQ, "2025 Search Ad Benchmarks for Home Services," 3,211 U.S. search campaigns, April 1, 2024 to March 21, 2025 — Average cost per lead: Air Conditioning Installation & Repair $127.74 · Heating & Furnaces $129.02 · Plumbing $129.02 · Electricians & Electrical Contractors $93.69 · Roofing & Gutters $228.15
5. Keystone, "Where home-improvement sales actually come from: 16,724 leads, three years," October 2026 — one contractor's CRM, September 1, 2023 to August 31, 2026. Used for: phone-share default, close rate, online inquiry timing.