Free worksheet - 9 pages

What a missed call actually costs you

The arithmetic, laid out line by line, so you can run it on your own numbers instead of somebody else's.

$A work van parked outside a house at dusk, a phone glowing on the dashboard$

What is in it

The four-line calculation, with a worked example for a five-tech shop
Where to find each input: your carrier log, your invoices, your card statement
Sourced benchmarks to sanity-check your own figures, every one linked
Why cost per lead beats guessing at 'the value of a call'
The second calculation nobody runs: what a slow callback costs on the calls you did answer
A blank worksheet page to fill in with a pen

9 pages. Written for someone holding a phone in a van.

Every calculator in this category is prefilled with numbers nobody can source

Search for what a missed call costs and you get the same figures on page after page. That 62% of contractor calls go unanswered. That every missed call is worth $1,200. That 85% of people who hit voicemail never ring back.

Follow the citations and they lead to other vendor blogs. The 62% traces back to a 2016 post by an SEO agency that watched 85 businesses for a month and sold call handling in the same article. We do not use those numbers and neither should you.

Use your own numbers instead

You already have everything the calculation needs. Your phone carrier can tell you how many inbound calls went unanswered last month. Your invoices tell you your average ticket. Your card statement tells you what you paid for advertising, and dividing that by the leads it produced tells you what one caller cost you to create.

The worksheet walks through it in four lines and shows a worked example the whole way down. It takes about twenty minutes.

The benchmarks that survive a check

A few figures in this market do trace to real data, and the worksheet uses them only to sanity-check your own. LocaliQ analysed 3,211 US home-services search campaigns run between April 2024 and March 2025 and reported a median cost per lead of $90.92, rising to $228.15 for roofing and falling to $46.99 for cleaning.

ServiceTitan's report on more than 3,000 trade companies puts the average call booking rate at 42%, and 24% for shops under five technicians. Invoca's platform data puts unanswered calls to home-services businesses at 27%. Each one is linked in the PDF, with a note on who paid for it.

Then the calculation nobody runs

The second half deals with the calls you did answer and then took two days to call back. Harvard Business Review's audit of 2,241 US firms found the average response took 42 hours, and that firms reaching a lead within an hour were about seven times more likely to qualify it.

That research was produced by a company selling lead-response software, which the worksheet says plainly. It is still the best public data there is, and the gap it describes is usually bigger than the missed-call gap.

What you end up with

One number, in dollars, for what your phone lost you last month. Worked out from your own business, with every assumption written down where you can argue with it.

If the number turns out to be small, you have saved yourself buying something you did not need. That is a good outcome too.