Free calculator
What do missed calls cost your business?
Most businesses have no idea how much revenue walks out the door every time a phone rings and nobody answers. Put in your own numbers below and find out. The math is transparent and the sources are cited.
Start from a typical profile, then adjust:
Presets are typical starting points for illustration, not benchmarks for your business. Every field stays editable.
Published studies put the small-business average near 60 percent. 25 is a conservative starting point.
Estimated revenue lost to missed calls per year
$0
0 missed calls a year. After the roughly 85 percent who never call back, about 0 would-be customers lost.
How it works: (calls per day x 365 x percent unanswered) gives missed calls per year. Of those, 85 percent never call back (see sources). Applying your close rate and average customer value gives the annual figure. Every input is yours to change.
The short version. A missed call is not a neutral event that the caller politely retries later. Published research finds that the majority of small-business calls go unanswered, that most callers who hit voicemail leave no message, and that the large majority never call back at all. They call the next business on the list. For a service business where one new customer is worth hundreds of dollars, a handful of missed calls a day compounds into a five or six figure annual hole.
What the research says
These are the figures that drive the calculator defaults. They come from published industry studies, not from Tilk. Where a single primary study is widely cited, it is named.
| Finding | Figure | Attributed to |
|---|---|---|
| Small-business calls that go unanswered | ~62% | 411 Locals study, 85 businesses across 58 industries |
| Callers who never call back after one failed attempt | ~85% | Widely cited industry figure (see sources) |
| Callers reaching voicemail who leave no message | ~80% | Aggregated industry reporting |
| Estimated lost revenue per missed call | $100 to $1,200 | Varies by ticket size; home services at the top end |
A note on honesty: these are third-party estimates, and studies vary in method and sample. The calculator above does not rely on them. It computes from the numbers you enter, so the result reflects your business, not an industry average.
Why a missed call is usually a lost call
The intuition that "they will just call back" is where most of the hidden cost hides. In practice the caller has a list, whether it is search results, a directory, or a referral thread, and the phone that gets answered first tends to win the job. Voicemail does not rescue the situation, because most callers who reach it hang up without leaving anything. After-hours makes it worse: a call that comes in at 7pm on a Friday and hits a machine is often a customer who has booked with a competitor by Monday.
The cost is worst where the ticket is biggest
The same missed-call percentage hurts a high-value service business far more than a low-ticket one, because each lost job is worth more. Three examples where the phone is still the front door:
- Law firms. A single new client can be worth thousands. An intake call that goes to voicemail at lunchtime is a case that walks to the firm that picked up. See our AI answering for law firms overview.
- Dental and medical practices. New-patient calls and rescheduling both run through the front desk, which is busy with the patient in the chair. See dental practices and medical offices.
- Home and trade services. High job value and lots of after-hours demand put these at the top of the per-missed-call range.
What actually closes the gap
There is no single fix, and the right answer depends on where your misses happen. A few options, honestly framed:
- Overflow and after-hours coverage. Most misses cluster at peak hours and outside business hours. Covering just those windows captures the bulk of the lost revenue.
- A human answering service. Effective, but priced per minute or per call, and quality varies.
- An AI phone agent. Answers every call on the first ring, at any hour, and can book, answer questions, and route. This is what Tilk does. It is not magic, and it will not close every call a skilled human would, but it turns "nobody answered" into "answered and booked" for the calls you are currently losing.
Sources and method
The unanswered-call rate traces to a study by 411 Locals covering 85 businesses across 58 industries. The call-back and voicemail figures are widely reported industry statistics that originate from sources including ServiceTitan, Invoca, and PATLive, aggregated across several 2026 industry reports. Per-missed-call revenue is an estimate that scales with average ticket size. Because primary studies differ in sample and method, we present these as attributed estimates rather than settled facts, and the calculator deliberately runs on your inputs instead of any single published number.
Published by Tilk. Corrections or better primary sources: [email protected].
Stop losing the calls you already paid to earn
Every missed call in the number above is a customer who was already trying to reach you. Hear how Tilk answers, books, and routes on the first ring.