Assumption: 20 a week. Use your own count if you have one.
Assumption: 48%. Invoca Home Services Lead Conversion Benchmarks Report 2026 found 52% of callers reach a person.
Assumption: 450 in your currency. No conversion is applied.
Assumption: 30%. Your estimate — no source, put your real figure in.
Assumption: same day. Bands are modelled from the response-speed sources below, not measured.
Assumption: 70%. Moneypenny / Censuswide, UK, January 2026.
£5,810
a month, or £69,725 a year
That is 13 jobs a month you never quoted for.
Unanswered£4,321
Too slow£1,489
These are your numbers and our assumptions; change any input. We do not sell call answering.
A month is taken as 4.33 weeks.
Unanswered: enquiries per week × 4.33 × missed% × close rate × job value × (1 − 23%). The 23% is the share of consumers who keep trying after getting no response (Moneypenny / Censuswide, UK, January 2026), so the rest of the missed enquiries are treated as gone.
Too slow: of the enquiries you do answer, a share is lost to a faster competitor: 0% if you reply within the hour, 35% same day, 70% next day or later, each multiplied by the share of customers who go with whoever responds first. That is then multiplied by your close rate and job value. Those three bands are modelled from the response-speed sources below, not measured — nobody has published a measured loss rate by reply band.
Nothing here is a per-missed-call price. There is no defensible published figure for what one missed call is worth, so this page does not show one.
Two things, and only two. The first is enquiries that never reach a person: the call that rings out while you are up a ladder, under a sink or driving between jobs. The second is enquiries you do reach, but slowly enough that somebody else has already quoted. Both end the same way, with a customer you never spoke to, so neither shows up in your accounts. There is no line in your books called lost because the phone rang out.
The model deliberately stops short of the numbers the industry likes to quote. There is no published, defensible figure for what a single missed call is worth, in any market, so this page does not print one. What it does instead is take your own enquiry volume, your own job value and your own close rate, and apply two published behaviours to them: roughly half of calls to home-services businesses do not reach a person, and most customers go with whoever answers first.
Almost none of it needs new software. A diverted line to a second phone, a fixed half-hour twice a day for callbacks, a voicemail greeting that promises a time and keeps it, and a web form that lands somewhere you actually look. If you work alone, the highest-return change is usually the simplest: decide who picks up when you cannot, and tell customers what to expect. An answered “I am on a job until four, can I call you at half past” beats a missed call every time.
By the time a customer contacts you, they have usually contacted two or three others. The evidence is consistent across markets: the majority say they will go with whoever gets back to them first, and only a small minority will keep chasing a business that did not respond. That makes reply time a competitive position rather than a courtesy. Move from next day to same day and you claw back part of the gap; move to within the hour and, on these assumptions, the second bar disappears entirely.
Change any input above to see what your own numbers do. If you want help closing the gap, we will look at your setup on a call and tell you what is worth fixing first.
We do not price a missed call on its own, because no defensible published figure exists for that. The calculator prices missed business instead: it takes your enquiries per week, the share of calls that never reach a person, your close rate and your average job value, and assumes that the 77% of people who would not keep trying after no response are gone. Every input is yours to change.
Because most customers contact more than one business. Moneypenny and Censuswide found in January 2026 that 70% of UK consumers are likely to choose whoever responds first, and Jobber found in 2026 that 55% of home-service customers expect a reply within an hour while only 20% of pros manage it. Speed is the gap between those two numbers.
They are as accurate as the inputs you put in. The defaults are industry figures from named, dated studies, and the three reply-time bands are modelled rather than measured, so treat the output as an order of magnitude and not an invoice. Put your own enquiry count, job value and close rate in and it gets a lot closer.
Usually four cheap things: divert the line to somebody who picks up, book two fixed callback slots a day, record a voicemail greeting that promises a call-back time and keep it, and make sure web enquiries land somewhere you look. Knight Li Group will go through your setup on a discovery call and say what is worth fixing first. We do not sell call answering.