How much do missed calls really cost UK tradespeople?

If you've searched anything to do with missed calls and trades work recently, you've probably seen a figure like "£24,000 a year" or "62% of calls go unanswered" quoted as fact. We wanted to know where those numbers actually come from before repeating them, so we went looking.

What the original survey actually says

The figure that most of this content traces back to is a survey of over 220 tradespeople, commissioned by the Builders Station and published on Fix Radio's site. The findings themselves are fairly modest and specific:

• 34% of tradespeople surveyed said they believe they've lost work because they weren't able to answer the phone.
• 60% said they struggle to answer calls while they're working.
• Only 22% advertise a landline number on their website, and just 4% consider a landline their main way of hearing from clients.

That's it. It's a real, named survey with a stated sample size, and the headline finding, that roughly a third of tradespeople believe missed calls have cost them work, is a reasonable one to take at face value: it's what people said about their own experience, not a calculated financial figure.

Read the original survey write-up on Fix Radio

Where the bigger numbers come from

The "£24,000 a year" figure doesn't come from that survey. As far as we can tell, it's a calculation that's been added on top by other websites: something like "if your average job is worth £250 and you miss two leads a week to a competitor, that's £500 a week, or roughly £24,000 across a working year." That's a worked example built on assumptions, not a measured result. It might be roughly right for your business, or it might be way off, depending on your average job value and how many calls you're genuinely missing.

The "62% of calls go unanswered" figure appears to come from a completely different source again, focused on small home service businesses more broadly, and we haven't been able to independently verify it or confirm it reflects the UK market specifically. It gets attached to the Fix Radio survey in a lot of marketing content, but it isn't part of it.

None of this means missed calls aren't a real cost. It just means the specific numbers being used to describe that cost are, in most cases, someone's illustrative maths, not independently measured research. We're not going to hand you a made-up number for your own business either: we don't have real data on how much missed calls cost the average UK tradesperson, and we'd rather say that plainly than repeat a figure we can't stand behind.

What you can work out for yourself

Rather than relying on a headline statistic, it's fairly quick to get a rough sense of your own numbers:

1. What's your average job worth? Not the biggest job you've done, a realistic average across a typical month.
2. How many calls do you think you're missing? Check your phone's missed call list over a week or two, on the tools and off.
3. How many of those callers do you think tried someone else instead? Nobody knows this for certain, but most tradespeople have a gut feeling about how much of that work simply walks to a competitor rather than waiting for a callback.

Multiply those together and you'll get a figure that's specific to you, which is worth more than a number that was calculated for a different business entirely.

What actually helps

Whatever the real number turns out to be for your business, the underlying problem the survey points at is straightforward: 60% of tradespeople say they struggle to answer calls while working, and that's when jobs get missed. There are a few ways to deal with that:

• Answer the phone anyway, and accept the job in front of you slows down.
• Let it go to voicemail, and hope the caller leaves a message and waits for a callback rather than ringing the next name on the list.
• Have someone else answer for you, whether that's a person or an AI receptionist like AllCalls, so the call gets a proper answer, a message gets taken accurately, and you find out about it straight away instead of hours later.

See how that works in practice on AllCalls for your trade, or check what it costs on Pricing.