What a missed call costs you: the arithmetic from your own call log, not a vendor's statistic
The only study we could find behind '62% of calls go unanswered' is a 2016 blog post about 85 businesses, and it counts voicemails as unanswered. Your call log, your booking rate and your job list give you your own number in an afternoon.
TL;DR
- Missed calls cost an HVAC, plumbing or electrical shop the gross profit on jobs it would have sold to real callers who never got through and never booked later: unique callers lost × booking rate × close rate × gross profit per job. In the illustrative month below, 60 calls that went to voicemail, rang out or were abandoned come to about 10 lost sold jobs, or about $47 of gross profit per unanswered call.
- The only original study we could find behind "62% of calls go unanswered" is a January 2016 blog post by a local SEO company: 85 businesses in 58 industries over 30 days, with voicemails counted as unanswered. It says nothing about HVAC, plumbing, electrical or after-hours calls.
- On three pages that came up for missed-call searches on September 24, the same 62% measures three different things, and none of them links a study.
- CallRail's Unanswered calls report counts voicemails and calls abandoned within 15 seconds as missed, and a call your own phone system picks up as answered. Its page doesn't say whether calls that simply rang out are in the missed count, so add up the statuses in your call log yourself.
- Work out business-hours overflow and after-hours calls separately. They have different fixes. For hours when nobody can book a visit, take them out of the ad schedule and lower the daily budget; in our reading, hiding the phone number alone doesn't stop the clicks.
Where does "62% of calls go unanswered" come from?
The only original source we could find for a 62% figure about unanswered calls is a post on the blog of 411 Locals, a local SEO company, dated January 18, 2016: "Small Business Owners Don't Answer 62% Of Phone Calls". Its method is one sentence: "We monitored the phone calls of 85 businesses, operating in 58 industries, for a period of 30 days."
The split it reports:
| What happened to the call | Share of calls |
|---|---|
| Answered | 37.8% |
| Went to voicemail | 37.8% |
| No response | 24.3% |
The 62% is the last two rows added together. The post also says 70% of the businesses answered fewer than half of their calls.
Three things about that number matter to a contractor:
- A voicemail counts as unanswered. More than half of the 62% reached voicemail. The post doesn't say how many of those callers left a message.
- It isn't about trades. The post doesn't list the 58 industries, the number of calls or the hours measured. Its own explanation for the result is that most US small businesses are one-person operations with no employees.
- It is ten years old. Nothing in it covers evenings, weekends or "after 5 pm", which is how at least one HVAC page below uses the number.
What happened to the 62% on the pages that rank
On September 24 we read five vendor and calculator pages that came up for "hvac missed calls" and "missed call cost calculator hvac". Three use 62%, each for something different:
| Page | What the 62% is said to measure | Source given |
|---|---|---|
| CallJolt, "How Much Does a Missed Call Cost Your HVAC Business?", February 22, 2026 | "of home service calls go unanswered", used as the default miss rate in its formula | "Industry research, 2026" |
| AgentZap, "HVAC Industry Phone Statistics", February 1, 2026, updated May 20, 2026 | HVAC calls that come outside regular business hours | "ACHR News, HVAC Call Pattern Analysis", no link |
| RunBy, "What a Missed HVAC Call Costs You in 2026", April 12, 2026, updated May 31, 2026 | "callers who reach voicemail never call back" | "Industry data" |
We can't show that any of these pages took the number from 411 Locals. None of them links a study, and a search on September 24 did not turn up an ACHR News article by the name AgentZap gives. Our source check of home services statistics traces more numbers like these.
The number these pages pair with it, that about 85% of callers who reach voicemail don't leave a message or never call back, is credited to "AT&T research" by Studio98, to an ACHR News study by AgentZap, and to 2026 research by Opus Labs on the HVAC Know It All calculator. We did not trace it. Neither number is used below, because your own call log replaces both.
What your call tracking counts as a missed call
CallRail's "Call answer status" page defines these statuses for incoming calls (it also lists Voice Assist and Outbound):
- Answered: you answered, or "a phone system outside of CallRail" answered.
- Missed: unanswered for 15 seconds and not sent to voicemail. If CallRail can't detect the voicemail on your own line, the call is marked Missed.
- Voicemail: CallRail's voicemail step answered, or voicemail was detected on your line.
- Abandoned: the caller hung up within 15 seconds. CallRail's glossary says that in this case "it is likely the recipient's phone did not have time to ring".
CallRail's Unanswered calls report counts as missed any unanswered inbound call that ends in a detected voicemail or is detected as abandoned, plus calls taken by a Voicemail step. So its missed count takes in voicemails and abandoned calls; counting voicemails as unanswered is the same lumping the 2016 post did. The page doesn't say whether calls with Missed status, the ones that simply rang out, are in that count, so check its total against the statuses in your call log.
The same page counts as answered a call picked up by "an automated system in which the customer didn't leave a voicemail". Our read is that a caller who gives up inside your office phone menu shows as answered.
Google Ads keeps its own log for calls to Google forwarding numbers. The call details report (Insights and reports → Report editor → Call details) shows each call's start time, duration and status, "missed or received". Google's page doesn't define "missed". It gives the caller's phone number for most calls longer than 15 seconds, so very short calls may have no number you can match to a customer.
How do you work out what HVAC missed calls cost you?
These numbers are an illustration, not client data. Put your own in their place.
One month, 240 calls from ads in the call tracking log: 180 answered, 24 voicemail, 26 missed, 10 abandoned. Those last three statuses add up to 60 unanswered calls, or 25%.
| Step | What you do | Left |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Start with voicemail, missed and abandoned calls | 60 calls |
| 2 | Set aside abandoned calls, which hung up within 15 seconds | 50 calls |
| 3 | Collapse repeat calls to unique phone numbers. One caller dialing three times is one customer at most | 41 callers |
| 4 | Remove numbers that booked anyway within seven days, because they called back or you did. Match them against your job list | 29 callers |
| 5 | Remove callers who weren't asking for service: suppliers, sales calls, job seekers, spam. For calls with no voicemail, apply the non-service share of answered calls in the same hours | 24 callers |
| 6 | Multiply by the booking rate of answered service calls in the same hours (60% here) | 14.4 booked visits |
| 7 | Multiply by your close rate, the share of booked visits that became a paid job (70% here) | 10.1 sold jobs |
| 8 | Multiply by your gross profit per sold job ($280 here) | about $2,820 a month |
The formula to keep:
Lost gross profit = callers lost × booking rate × close rate × gross profit per job
Divide the result by the 60 unanswered calls and you get about $47 of gross profit per call in this illustration. Divided by the 24 real callers lost, it is about $118 each.
A few choices in that table are ours, and you can change them:
- Seven days in step 4. Pick a window and keep it fixed month to month.
- Existing customers stay in. A missed call from a past customer can still be a job. If they called back and booked, step 4 already caught them.
- Gross profit, not the invoice. A job you never got also never used a truck, parts or a tech's afternoon. If you want the revenue figure, use your average invoice in step 8 instead: at $450, the month above comes to about $4,540.
The same month in a vendor calculator. CallJolt's formula is weekly calls × 0.62 missed × conversion rate × average ticket, with 30% conversion in its example. Applied to the same 240 calls and a $450 ticket, that gives about $20,100 for the month, against about $4,540 of revenue from the log. The log's conversion rate is the higher one (60% × 70% = 42%), so the whole gap is in the count of people lost: 149 assumed calls against 24 counted callers.
What else does a missed call cost besides the job?
The click is already paid for. Google's page on call assets says clicks on the call button "cost the same as headline clicks (a standard CPC)". The page doesn't mention whether the call is answered; our read is that the charge is for the click, so an unanswered call costs the same. In the illustration, if $9,600 of ad spend produced the 240 calls, the 60 that went unanswered, abandoned calls included, carried about $2,400 of it.
Local Services Ads keep score. Google's ranking page for Local Services Ads says "Missed calls may negatively affect your responsiveness", and lists responsiveness among the factors in how likely your ad is to produce a lead. From October 1, 2026, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable from Google's email to advertisers, a missed Local Services Ads call during business hours is charged as a lead if the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds, with some exceptions. The article on charged missed calls covers that rule and what to change in your hours and phone menu.
Overflow and after-hours are two different problems
CallRail's Unanswered calls report can show missed calls by hour of the day and by day of the week. Run the table separately for business hours, evenings and weekends, because the fixes differ.
Overflow during business hours means the CSRs are on other lines, or the tech who carries the phone is under a house. Some of those callers are still reachable, and step 4 shows how many booked after a callback. The fixes are on the phone side: the ring order, ringing more than one phone at once (CallRail calls this Simulcall), a rollover line, and a callback the same hour.
After-hours calls need someone who can book a visit, or they need you to stop paying for them. Google Ads lets you schedule a call asset to show "only when your business is answering phone calls". That setting schedules only the phone number. Google's Ad Scheduling page says campaigns are set to show ads "All day" by default, so our reading is that the ad itself keeps running and taking clicks. To stop buying the hours, use the campaign's ad schedule, which Google says lets you "Specify certain hours or days of the week when you want your ads to show". Google also says a scheduled campaign still paces "toward a monthly spend of 30.4 times your average daily budget". Our read is that the money moves to the hours you keep unless you lower the budget too.
A Dallas plumbing and air conditioning account we run had both halves of this problem. Calls peaked from about half past five to about nine in the evening, and the daily budget was largely gone by mid-afternoon. Once every call was recorded with its outcome, some evening calls turned out to be bought and then rolled to an after-hours service, or to somebody who could take a message but not book a visit. The office first agreed which evening hours were really covered, and only then did the budget move onto them.
Barbosa Plumbing & Air Conditioning, Dallas. Calls that rang out: −26%. Window: 120 days against the 120 before. Source: Call tracking.
Limit: 'Calls that rang out' is measured from the tracking line, so a caller who hung up and immediately rang the office direct is counted as a miss here and as a customer in the business. The real figure is better than ours.
Same account. Booked calls after 6pm: +25 to +30%. Window: 120 days against the 120 before. Source: Call tracking.
Limit: Four months either side includes a Texas summer on one end and not the other. Evening demand is not flat across the year and some of this movement is the calendar.
As the full case says, the biggest single change was the client's own staffing.
Does an HVAC answering service pay for itself?
The table gives you the most any fix can recover, block by block. Put an answering service's monthly price next to the lost gross profit for the hours it would cover. If the service costs more than those hours lose, the ad-schedule fix above is the cheaper one.
Then ask what the service does with a call. One that books visits into your schedule can recover up to the table's figure for its hours. One that takes a message moves those callers from "lost" to "called back", and step 4 shows what share of called-back callers went on to book.
What this doesn't cover
- Capacity. If the board is full for the next five days, an extra booked call may wait or push other work. The table counts every lost job at full gross profit and doesn't model a full schedule.
- Callers your log never sees. Someone who saw the ad but dialed your office number directly is outside the tracking line, whether you answered or not. Repeat business and referrals from a lost customer are left out on purpose.
- Forms, texts and Local Services Ads messages. The same method works for them with response time in place of answer status, but this piece doesn't work it through.
Do this in your call log
- Export 90 days of calls from call tracking or from Google Ads call details: start time, status, duration, caller number and source.
- Split by status. Answered, voicemail, missed and abandoned, each in its own column. Set abandoned calls aside.
- Collapse to unique numbers and match them to your job list. Anyone who booked within seven days comes off the lost list. Getting booked and sold jobs out of your CRM covers ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro and Jobber.
- Listen to the voicemails. Tag suppliers, sales calls and spam.
- Work out the booking rate and close rate from answered service calls in the same hours, not from the whole day. Measuring answer rate and booking rate shows how to get both from the call log.
- Do the multiplication for each block of hours. Business hours, evenings and weekends each get their own number.
- Decide each block: cover it, or take it out of the ad schedule and lower the budget to match. Then set up missed-call notifications, which CallRail can send, and a same-hour callback rule for the hours you keep.
FAQ
How much does a missed call cost an HVAC company? We haven't found an industry figure with a traceable source. Work out your own with the table above. In the illustration it came to about $47 of gross profit per unanswered call.
Is it true that 62% of calls to small businesses go unanswered? It was true of the 85 businesses in 58 industries that 411 Locals watched for 30 days, in a post published in January 2016, counting voicemails as unanswered. It says nothing about HVAC, plumbing or electrical companies (the post doesn't list its 58 industries) or about after-hours calls.
What counts as a missed call in CallRail? On the call log, Missed is a call unanswered for 15 seconds that didn't go to voicemail. The Unanswered calls report counts voicemails and abandoned calls, which hung up within 15 seconds, as missed. Its help page doesn't say whether calls with Missed status are in that count.
Do I pay Google for a call nobody answered? For a call asset in Google Ads, our read is yes: you pay for the tap on the call button, at the same price as a headline click, and Google's page says nothing about whether anyone answered. In Local Services Ads, from October 1, 2026, a missed business-hours call where the caller stays on the line for more than 20 seconds is charged, with some exceptions, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable.
Do I need an HVAC answering service? By this arithmetic, when the lost gross profit in the hours it would cover is more than its monthly price. A service that books visits can recover more of that than one that only takes messages.
Sources
- 411 Locals, "Small Business Owners Don't Answer 62% Of Phone Calls", January 18, 2016, https://411locals.us/small-business-owners-dont-answer-62-of-phone-calls/. Read in full on September 24, 2026, including its chart of answered and unanswered calls.
- CallRail Help Center, "Call answer status", https://support.callrail.com/hc/en-us/articles/5712088951437-Call-answer-status. Read in full on September 24, 2026.
- CallRail Help Center, "Unanswered calls report", https://support.callrail.com/hc/en-us/articles/5712132142605-Unanswered-calls-report. Read in full on September 24, 2026.
- CallRail Help Center, "The CallRail Glossary", https://support.callrail.com/hc/en-us/articles/5711422972429-The-CallRail-Glossary. Read in full on September 24, 2026.
- Google Ads Help, "View details of each call", https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9099302. Read in full on September 24, 2026.
- Google Ads Help, "About call assets", https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2453991. Read in full on September 24, 2026.
- Google Ads Help, "About Ad Scheduling", https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2404244. Read in full on September 24, 2026.
- Local Services Help, "About ad rankings", https://support.google.com/localservices/answer/7527305. Read in full on September 24, 2026.
- Search Engine Roundtable, "Google To Charge For Missed & Subsequent Calls On LSAs", Barry Schwartz, August 25, 2026, https://www.seroundtable.com/google-lsa-missed-subsequent-calls-41940.html. Read in full on September 24, 2026.
- The five vendor and calculator pages in the check above, each read in full on September 24, 2026: CallJolt, https://calljolt.com/blog/hvac/how-much-does-a-missed-call-cost-hvac; AgentZap, https://agentzap.ai/blog/hvac-phone-statistics; RunBy, https://runbyai.co/blog/missed-hvac-call-cost-2026; Studio98, https://studio98.ai/missing-calls/; HVAC Know It All, https://hvacknowitall.com/tools/missed-call-revenue-calculator.