We traced 21 home services marketing statistics to their source. Two hold up as quoted.

TL;DR

• We checked 21 home services marketing statistics that vendor and agency pages repeat. Two hold up as quoted. Six are outdated, two are misquoted, and eleven we could not find in any study with a stated method.
• The 7–8% of revenue for marketing that contractors hear as an SBA rule comes from a 2012 post on the SBA.gov blog by contributor Caron Beesley that cites no source. That page is gone. The SBA.gov blog post on marketing budgets that is live today, by outside writer Rieva Lesonsky, says there is "no hard and fast answer".
• The 62% unanswered-call figure is a 2016 count of calls to 85 businesses in 58 industries, with voicemails counted as unanswered. The newest vendor data we found, Invoca's July 2026 report, says a person answers 52% of calls to its home services customers, and 65% of calls longer than 15 seconds.
• A March 2026 roundup still prints HVAC cost per lead as $92.76, a figure from LocaliQ's 2023 edition. LocaliQ's current edition puts the median search-ad cost per lead at $127.74 for air conditioning installation and repair and $129.02 for heating.
• Every number here that comes with a method line was measured by a company that sells local SEO, call tracking, ads, lead-response software or review software. Check what they counted before you size a budget on one.

How we checked each number

On September 24, 2026 we read the statistics roundups that come up for home services and HVAC marketing statistics, from Invoca, CallRail, ServiceTitan and WebFX, plus vendor and agency pages that repeat single figures. For each number we followed the credit to the earliest document we could open and read in full, and wrote down who measured it, when, how many businesses or people were in the sample, and who paid for it.

Each number gets one of four verdicts:

• Holds. The source says it, the data is recent, and the repeated number matches it. Where the wording around it stretches what was measured, we say so.
• Outdated. The source says it, but a newer edition from the same source gives a different number, or the data is about ten years old or more.
• Misquoted. The source exists and says something different from how the number is used.
• Untraceable. We could not find the number in a published study with a method behind it. That is not proof nobody ever measured it. It means nobody quoting it can show you the measurement.

The 21 statistics at a glance

Do most calls to home service companies go unanswered?

1. 62% of calls go unanswered: outdated. The source is a post dated January 18, 2016 on the blog of 411 Locals, a local SEO company. It monitored calls to 85 businesses in 58 industries for 30 days: 37.8% answered, 37.8% sent to voicemail, 24.3% with no response. The 62% is the last two added together, so a call that reached voicemail counts as unanswered. The post doesn't say how many calls it counted. In 2026 the number still opens missed-call pages from answering-service vendors such as Aira and Cira. Our breakdown of what a missed call costs follows it onto three HVAC pages where it measures three different things.

2. 48% of home services callers never speak with a person: holds, for Invoca's customers and for calls, not callers. Invoca's report, published July 2026, says a person answers 52% of calls to home services businesses, and 65% of calls longer than 15 seconds, which Invoca says filters out misdials and quick hang-ups. Plumbing is highest at 74%; HVAC is second lowest at 34%. The figures are averages across Invoca's customer base, drawn from more than 70 million calls in 10 industries, and the report doesn't say how many went to home services companies. Invoca's own May 2024 post pitches its tracking to home services companies "that have hundreds of business locations", so our reading is that its customers skew toward larger, multi-location companies. Invoca's September 2026 post turns this into "48% of those who call never speak with a person". The report counts calls a person answered; it doesn't say whether a caller got through on a later try.

3. 18% unanswered on weekdays, 41% on weekends: untraceable. Invoca's own statistics roundup, dated March 4, 2025, prints it with "(Source: Invoca)" and no link. Its chart narrows it to calls from search, and names no period or call count. Invoca's own numbers have moved: a May 2024 post on its blog says 27% of calls to home services businesses are not answered, against the July 2026 report in row 2. Of the three measures, only the report comes with a method line.

4. 85% of callers who can't reach you never call back: untraceable. Aira credits it to PATLive, an answering service, with a link that returned "page not found" on September 25, 2026. Cira credits it to "Forbes / BIA Kelsey" by way of four other sites, but the credit links to PCN Answers' "2026 Small Business Missed Call Revenue Study", a compilation of figures published elsewhere that calls itself "a structured secondary-data synthesis". PCN, also an answering service, credits the 85% to another one, AnswerConnect, with no link, sample or date. The closest measured number we found is about messages, not callbacks: Invoca's May 2024 post says its platform data shows fewer than 3% of callers pushed to voicemail leave one.

Do calls really convert 10–15 times better than web leads?

5. Calls convert to 10–15x more revenue than web leads: untraceable. Invoca's roundup credits BIA/Kelsey without a link; the only link in that item goes to Invoca's own call-tracking product page, which doesn't contain the figure. ServiceTitan's March 2025 list credits Invoca and changes "web leads" to "online messaging". The BIA/Kelsey call report we could open, a 43-page paper from 2016 whose distribution was underwritten by the analytics company Marchex, doesn't contain the figure either.

6. Respond within 5 minutes and you're 21 times more likely to qualify the lead: outdated. This one has a real study behind it. InsideSales.com and MIT professor James Oldroyd presented it on October 16, 2007: three years of data from six companies that call back web-form leads, more than 15,000 leads and 100,000 call attempts. The odds of reaching a lead fell 100 times, and of qualifying one 21 times, when the first call came at 30 minutes instead of 5. Its summary says: "This study did not address close ratios." Vendasta's page, updated August 2025, restates it as five minutes against one hour, which is not what the study compared. An inbound call from your ad is the customer already on the line. Our reading is that the study applies, at most, to how fast your office returns form fills, and it measured 2007 phone habits.

7. 78% of customers buy from the first company to respond: untraceable. Vendasta credits it to "a Lead Connect survey". Aira credits "Lead Connect / MIT", and Cira credits "Lead Connect (via Vendasta)". We found no published Lead Connect report, sample or date.

8. 62% of home services customers called during their purchasing journey in 2022: untraceable. Invoca's roundup links it to Invoca's 2022 buyer experience report. The report's opening page says Invoca surveyed 500 consumers who had made a "high-stakes purchase" in the past year, across seven industries, home services among them. The findings page, which Invoca's May 2024 post links, opened an empty folder, so we could not see the 62% or how many respondents were home services buyers. That post places the figure in a paragraph about home repairs ("62% will call before making a purchase"), but the survey behind it covered seven industries. ServiceTitan's list repeats it with "(Source: Invoca)".

Does the SBA really say to spend 7–8% of revenue on marketing?

9. 7–8% of revenue, credited to the SBA: untraceable. Chron's small-business section says the SBA recommends 7 to 8 percent of gross revenue and gives an SBA.gov blog post as its reference. We found that post in the Internet Archive: published June 4, 2012 by Caron Beesley, a writer and marketing communications consultant who, per her bio, worked with the SBA.gov team. It says, as a general rule, that small businesses under $5 million "should allocate 7-8 percent of their revenues to marketing", assuming 10–12% margins, and cites no study. The site's disclaimer in that archived copy says views on SBA.gov blogs "are those of the individual contributors". The post's address returns a 404 today. The SBA.gov blog post on marketing budgets that is live now, from 2019 and by Rieva Lesonsky, CEO of the media company GrowBiz Media, says there is "no hard and fast answer" and suggests asking your trade association. That post also passes on a 2018 average of 7.9% of revenue from Web Strategies, across B2B and B2C companies, not home services.

10. 3–5% of revenue, credited to the SBA: misquoted. Digital Harvest's May 2026 guide for HVAC and plumbing shops calls 3–5% the SBA guideline and says it may apply to established companies. The same 2012 post is the only SBA.gov page we found with those numbers, and it says the reverse: 2–3% for run-rate marketing and up to 3–5% for start-up marketing. So both "SBA" percentages that contractors hear trace to one contributor's 2012 post, and one of them is applied backwards. Our HVAC marketing budget article works the budget out from trucks and tickets instead.

What do HVAC marketing statistics say a lead costs?

11. $92.76 HVAC cost per lead and $66.02 home services average: outdated. CallRail's roundup of March 26, 2026 prints both, with a 4.80% click-through rate, $6.55 per click and 10.22% conversion rate for home services. Every one of those numbers matches the 2023 edition of LocaliQ's home services benchmarks, which covered 2,564 campaigns from April 2022 to March 2023. There $92.76 was the median for "Heating & Furnaces", not for HVAC as a whole. LocaliQ has since replaced that page with the 2025 edition: 3,211 US search campaigns run for its home services customers from April 1, 2024 to March 21, 2025, at least 103 per category, with "averages" that are medians. Median cost per lead there is $127.74 for air conditioning installation and repair, $129.02 for heating and furnaces, $129.02 for plumbing, $93.69 for electricians and $90.92 across home services. The two editions use different campaigns two years apart, so the gap from $92.76 to $129.02 is not one measured change. LocaliQ's 2025 edition does report cost per lead rising year over year for 69% of home services businesses, with an average increase of 10.51%. A "lead" here is whatever each campaign counted as a conversion, not a booked call or a sold job. Why cost per lead is the wrong number to manage by explains what to track instead.

12–14. WebFX's $275 per lead, $41.24 per click and $908 spend after search: untraceable. WebFX's 2026 list of HVAC marketing statistics states the $275 HVAC cost per lead with no source, and links the $41.24 click and the $908 spend to Invoca's statistics roundup. All three numbers are in that roundup, but only as chart images. The $41.24 for HVAC sits under "Google Ads search keyword cost per click" and the $275 for HVAC under "Average cost per lead in the US", both marked "Source: Google". The $908, for HVAC repair, sits under "Average amount spent after search", marked "(LSA)". No chart names a study, year or sample, and we found no Google publication with these figures.

15. Home services cost per lead often exceeds $100: untraceable. Invoca's roundup credits it in the text to "WordStream, ACCA, HubSpot" with no links and no year, while the cost-per-lead chart beside it says "Source: Google". If you need a lead-cost figure, the 2025 LocaliQ edition in row 11 at least prints its sample and window. Local Services Ads have their own tangle of benchmark pages, which we traced in what Google LSA leads cost.

Are 46% of Google searches really local?

16. 46% of all Google searches are seeking local information: untraceable. As reported by Search Engine Roundtable on October 17, 2018, the number came from an SEO consultant's tweet about a Google presentation at a local search event at Google's headquarters. The report said all it had was that tweet and asked how Google defined local intent. We found no Google publication with the number or a definition. HubSpot's local SEO list, updated May 2025, credits it to GoGulf. The one Google document we found on the question, a 2016 one-pager from Think with Google, says 30% of mobile searches were related to location, from global Google search data for April 2016. Neither figure tells you whether local SEO or ads should come first.

Which review statistics are still current?

BrightLocal runs the survey behind most of the review numbers in these roundups, and its old editions keep circulating after a new one is out.

17. 88% trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations: outdated. The only survey we found that reports 88% for this question is BrightLocal's 2014 edition: 2,104 entries from its consumer panel, 90% US and 10% Canada, collected in May and June 2014. The 88% included people who said yes only "as long as there are multiple" reviews (32%) and yes only if they believed the review was authentic (30%). The 2026 edition puts it at 49%. Entrepreneur's 2017 contributor piece, still in search results, credits the 88% to "a recent study by Invespro".

18. 86% read reviews, people read 10 reviews on average, 57% need 4 stars: outdated. All three come from BrightLocal's 2018 edition: 1,000 US consumers surveyed in October 2018. Invoca's roundup prints all three and links the 86% to BrightLocal's survey address, which now opens the 2026 edition. That edition says 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, 68% will only use a business with four stars or more (55% a year earlier), 31% want 4.5 or more, and 47% won't use a business with fewer than 20 reviews.

19. 88% would use a business that answers all its reviews; 81% rely on Google reviews: outdated. CallRail's March 2026 roundup prints both. They match BrightLocal's 2024 edition, 1,141 US consumers. BrightLocal's 2026 edition, published February 11, 2026, six weeks before CallRail's page, gives 80% for answering every review and 71% for reading reviews on Google.

20. 45% now use ChatGPT and similar tools for local recommendations: holds, as a survey answer. BrightLocal's 2026 edition, 1,002 US adults surveyed through SurveyMonkey, says use of these tools for local business recommendations rose from 6% to 45% in a year. Cira's list repeats it correctly. It covers every kind of local business, not contractors, and it counts people who used the tools, not people who hired from them. Invoca's July 2026 report says the volume of calls it can attribute to these tools is still very low.

Does keeping 5% more customers really add 25–95% to profit?

21. A 5% increase in retention raises profits 25–95%: misquoted as evidence. Simpro's August 2026 guide to selling HVAC maintenance agreements cites it to Harvard Business Review. HBR's 2014 article attributes it to Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company and links a Bain brief, "Prescription for cutting costs". That brief says that in financial services, a 5% rise in customer retention produces more than a 25% rise in profit. There is no 95% in it and nothing about service trades. A 2006 piece on Bain's own site repeats "as much as 95 per cent" as a Bain "theory", again with no study or sample. Retention may well pay in your business, and what maintenance agreement advertising returns is worth working out from your own renewals, but the 25–95% figure is not evidence either way.

What this doesn't cover

• Paywalled and unopened reports. We did not buy reports or read studies we could not open, including any paid BIA/Kelsey reports and any earlier Bain research behind the 25–95% figure. "Untraceable" here means we could not find a primary source we could read by September 25, 2026.
• Whether the underlying idea is true. The verdicts are about the numbers as quoted, not about whether calls, reviews or speed matter.
• How well the sources fit a small shop. The current figures cited here come from Invoca's and LocaliQ's own customers and from a general consumer panel. None of them is a sample of HVAC, plumbing or electrical companies your size.

Check a statistic before you spend money on it

1. Click the credit. If it leads to another roundup, a product page or nowhere, treat the number as untraceable.
2. Find the method line. Who was measured, when, and how many. If there isn't one, don't base a decision on the number.
3. Check the edition. Survey series such as BrightLocal's change every year. Search the publisher's site for the latest one before you quote an old one.
4. Check what was counted. Is a voicemail a missed call? Is a lead a form fill, any call, or a booked job? The same word covers all of these.
5. Check who paid, and what they sell. Not to dismiss the number, but to know which way the definitions lean.
6. Replace it with your own number. Your call-tracking log gives your own answer rate, and your CRM gives sold jobs by lead source. Our pieces on the booking rate your CSRs get from ad calls and what an agency report counts as a conversion show where to find both.

How to cite this page

Lonta AI, "We traced 21 home services marketing statistics to their source", https://lonta.io/blog/home-services-marketing-statistics/, checked September 24, 2026. When you use one of the numbers, cite the original study from the Sources list, not this page. Corrections, or an original we missed, to [email protected]; we re-check the page by October 24, 2026.

FAQ

Do 62% of calls to home service businesses go unanswered? Not as a current or trade-specific figure. The 62% is a 2016 count of calls to 85 businesses in 58 industries, and it counts voicemail as unanswered. Invoca's July 2026 report says a person answers 52% of calls to its home services customers.

What percentage of revenue should an HVAC company spend on marketing? There is no SBA rule. The 7–8% and 3–5% figures trace to a contributor's 2012 post on the SBA.gov blog that cites no study, and the live SBA.gov blog post on the topic, by an outside writer, says there is no hard and fast answer. Work the budget out from open truck slots and what a sold job is worth.

What is the average cost per lead for HVAC search ads? LocaliQ's 2025 benchmarks, from 3,211 search campaigns run for its own customers between April 2024 and March 2025, give medians of $127.74 for air conditioning installation and repair and $129.02 for heating. LocaliQ presents them as benchmarks for both Google Ads and Microsoft Ads and doesn't split the two. Those are costs per conversion, not per booked call or sold job.

How many consumers read online reviews before choosing a local business? BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults says 97% read reviews for local businesses and 68% will only use a business rated four stars or higher. It covers all local businesses, not contractors specifically.

Where does the 46% local-search figure come from? From a 2018 tweet about a Google presentation, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable. We found no Google publication with the number. Google's own 2016 one-pager said 30% of mobile searches were related to location.

Sources

Every source below was read in full on September 24, 2026, except Invoca's 2022 report and the PCN Answers study, read on September 25.

Original studies and the pages they came from:

• 411 Locals, "Small Business Owners Don't Answer 62% Of Phone Calls", https://411locals.us/small-business-owners-dont-answer-62-of-phone-calls/
• Invoca, "The Invoca Home Services Lead Conversion Benchmarks Report 2026", https://www.invoca.com/reports/the-invoca-home-services-lead-conversion-benchmarks-report-2026
• Invoca blog, "See How Much Missed Sales Calls Cost Home Services Businesses", https://www.invoca.com/blog/how-much-missed-sales-calls-cost-home-services-businesses
• Invoca, "Invoca Buyer Experience Benchmark Report 2022", https://experience.invoca.com/2022-invoca-buyer-experience-report/
• BIA/Kelsey, "Call Commerce: A $1 Trillion Engine", https://www.bia.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/biakelsey-industrywatch-callcommerce.pdf
• InsideSales.com, "The InsideSales.com/MIT Lead Response Management Study", 2008 copy of the study page, https://25649.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na2.net/hub/25649/file-13535879-pdf/docs/mit_study.pdf
• SBA.gov blog, "How to Set a Marketing Budget that Fits your Business Goals and Provides a High Return on Investment", June 4, 2012, Internet Archive copy of August 17, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20140817195205/http://www.sba.gov:80/blogs/how-set-marketing-budget-fits-your-business-goals-and-provides-high-return-investment
• U.S. Small Business Administration blog, "How to Get the Most From Your Marketing Budget", https://www.sba.gov/blog/how-get-most-your-marketing-budget
• LocaliQ, "2025 Search Ad Benchmarks for Home Services", https://localiq.com/blog/home-services-search-advertising-benchmarks/
• LocaliQ, "Home Services Search Advertising Benchmarks for 2023", Internet Archive copy of March 22, 2025, https://web.archive.org/web/20250322093905/https://localiq.com/blog/home-services-search-advertising-benchmarks/
• Think with Google, "How Mobile Search Connects Consumers to Stores", https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/_qs/documents/620/mobile-search-trends-consumers-to-stores.pdf
• Search Engine Roundtable, "Did Google Say 46% Of Searches Have Local Intent?", https://www.seroundtable.com/google-46-of-searches-have-local-intent-26529.html
• BrightLocal, "Local Consumer Review Survey 2026", https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey/
• BrightLocal, "Local Consumer Review Survey 2024", https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey-2024/
• BrightLocal, "Local Consumer Review Survey 2018", https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey-2018/
• BrightLocal, "Local Consumer Review Survey 2014", https://www.brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey-2014/
• Bain & Company, "Prescription for cutting costs", https://media.bain.com/Images/BB_Prescription_cutting_costs.pdf
• Bain & Company, "Retaining customers is the real challenge", January 20, 2006, https://www.bain.com/insights/retaining-customers-is-the-real-challenge/
• Harvard Business Review, "The Value of Keeping the Right Customers", https://hbr.org/2014/10/the-value-of-keeping-the-right-customers

Pages that repeat the numbers:

• Invoca blog, "40+ Statistics Home Services Marketers Need to Know in 2025", https://www.invoca.com/blog/home-services-marketing-stats
• Invoca blog, "4 High-Intent Moments When Home Services AI Agents Save the Sale", September 22, 2026, https://www.invoca.com/blog/4-high-intent-moments-home-services-ai-agents-save-sale
• CallRail blog, "31 home services marketing statistics every contractor needs to know in 2026", https://www.callrail.com/blog/home-services-marketing-statistics
• ServiceTitan blog, "Top 50 Home Services Industry Statistics You Need to Know", https://www.servicetitan.com/blog/home-services-industry-statistics
• WebFX, "44 HVAC Marketing Statistics You Should Know for 2026", https://www.webfx.com/blog/home-services/hvac-marketing-statistics/
• Chron Small Business, "What Percentage of Gross Revenue Should Be Used for Marketing & Advertising?", https://smallbusiness.chron.com/percentage-gross-revenue-should-used-marketing-advertising-55928.html
• Digital Harvest, "What's a Good HVAC & Plumbing Marketing Budget Under $1M?", https://digitalharvest.io/hvac-plumbing-marketing-budget-under-one-million/
• Vendasta, "Why Lead Response Time Matters (And How to Improve It in 2025)", https://www.vendasta.com/blog/lead-response-time/
• Aira, "62% of Business Calls Go Unanswered: The $126K Cost [Data]", https://www.getaira.io/blog/missed-business-calls-statistics
• Cira, "Missed Call Statistics 2026: 120+ Stats, Sources Linked", https://www.hicira.com/missed-call-statistics
• PCN Answers, "2026 Small Business Missed Call Revenue Study", https://pcnanswers.com/missed-call-revenue-study/
• HubSpot blog, "16 Stats That Prove the Importance of Local SEO", https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/local-seo-stats
• Simpro, "How to Sell HVAC Maintenance Agreements", https://www.simprogroup.com/blog/sell-hvac-maintenance-agreements
• Entrepreneur, "Who's Managing Your Online Reviews?", https://www.entrepreneur.com/growing-a-business/whos-managing-your-online-reviews/288123