Phone answer rate statistics for home services (2026), including our own

Most statistics pages in this industry cite each other in a circle until nobody can find the original study. We wanted one page where every number is traceable. So there are exactly two kinds of figure below: third-party statistics we read directly in the source document and linked, and our own results, which we measured and are publishing whether or not they flatter us.

The most useful current dataset is Hiya's State of the Call 2026. The research was conducted by Censuswide across more than 12,000 consumers in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Spain, with roughly 2,000 respondents per country, fielded between December 17, 2025 and January 2, 2026. Source: https://work.hiya.com/hubfs/2026/Hiya_SotC_2026_FINAL.pdf

Read the first and last rows together. 86% will not answer an unidentified number, and 20% say nothing at all would change that. This is not a problem you can fully solve by calling more persistently. A meaningful slice of the market has decided in advance not to pick up.

The same survey asked which call-screening features people use. A third use none. But the ones who do are mostly not using some obscure app; they are using what shipped with the handset.

• 33% use no call screening features at all.
• 26% use Google's built-in screening, such as Call Screen on Android.
• 18% use Apple's built-in features, such as Live Voicemail or Silence Unknown Callers.
• 14% use a third-party screening app.
• 11% do not know whether their phone has call screening.

That matters more than the raw percentages suggest. Screening built into the operating system is on by default for a growing number of people and improves without anyone choosing to upgrade it. A returned call from an unrecognised number is being filtered by the device before a human ever decides anything.

We are an early-stage studio, so we do not have a large client dataset to draw on. What we do have is a complete log of our own outreach, which we ran and measured ourselves in 2026. Here it is, including the part that makes us look bad.

Two honest caveats before anyone reuses these. First, this is us as the caller, contacting small businesses. It is not a measurement of how a homeowner responds to a contractor, and it should not be presented as one. Second, the sample is one operator's logs over a few weeks, not a panel study. It is a real ledger, which is exactly why we are showing it, but it is a small one.

The first touch was never our bottleneck. We reached 21 humans by phone. Then we let 17 interested people go cold, one of whom had explicitly asked us to call back. Nothing in that failure required a better script or a bigger list. It required someone, or something, to notice the silence and act on it.

Put the two datasets side by side and a fairly specific picture appears. When you return a call, you are calling from a number the customer's phone does not recognise, into a population where 86% do not answer unidentified numbers and a third of handsets are screening on the owner's behalf. The customer asked you to call. Their phone still treated you like a stranger.

• Identify yourself. 73% say businesses should show up on caller ID, and a verified business name is the single most persuasive thing you can put in front of them. Registering your business number with the major call-analytics providers is free and is the step most small shops skip.
• Do not rely on the redial. If the call does not land, the follow-up has to reach them another way. A text does not have to survive the same filter a call does.
• Close the follow-up gap first. Our own logs say the second touch is where the money leaks, not the first. On our missed-call text-back, about 38% come back.
• Answer the phone when you can. A third of the people who answered us did so on a first attempt, and no automation beats a human picking up.

None of that requires buying anything. The caller-ID registration is free, the discipline of following up is free, and the honest version of this advice is that most shops would get more out of a calendar reminder than a new tool. We build the automated version for people who would rather not remember, and we publish our prices at advai.cloud/pricing so you can decide whether that trade is worth it.

• Third-party figures come from Hiya's State of the Call 2026, conducted by Censuswide, more than 12,000 consumers across six countries, roughly 2,000 per country, fielded December 17 2025 to January 2 2026. We read the report itself rather than a summary of it.
• We excluded one widely repeated figure, that 46% of legitimate business calls go unanswered, because we could not find it anywhere in the report that supposedly contains it. If we cannot see a number in its source, it does not appear here.
• Our own figures are counts from our outreach logs as of 2026-08-09. No estimates, no annualising, no projecting.
• Our outreach data measures us calling small businesses. It does not measure homeowner behaviour toward contractors, and we have not presented it as though it does.
• The 38% text-back recovery figure is our own standing operating figure for that feature, used consistently across this site.

If you find an error on this page, tell us and we will correct it in public. That is a lower bar than it sounds like, and most pages of statistics in this industry do not clear it.