How many calls do plumbers miss - and what each one really costs
Daan van den Bergh
About one in four on one vendor's data, and worse at weekends on figures another vendor cited. Call-tracking firm Invoca says about 26% of calls never get answered on its customer platform, and over 60% in some industries, in a February 2024 post that names none of them. For home services, Jeff Martin, ServiceTitan's solutions engineer for its Scheduling Pro product, said in 2023 that recent data shows 18% of calls going unanswered on weekdays and 41% at weekends; the recap doesn't say whose data that is. Both are vendor figures and neither is about European plumbers, so treat them as an order of magnitude rather than your number. Yours you can count this week.
A missed call is any call that rings out, drops to voicemail, or arrives while you are already on the phone - counted whether or not the caller rings back. Voicemail rescues very few of them: Invoca's platform data puts the share of callers pushed to voicemail who leave a message at under 3%.
None of this shows up in your accounts. A missed call never reaches an invoice, so it feels free, and the arithmetic further down says otherwise.
Why do plumbers miss so many calls?
Mostly, the job itself gets in the way.
- Your hands are full. You can't take a call with your arm down a soil pipe, and you shouldn't try.
- You're driving. The phone doesn't wait until you've parked.
- It's out of hours. Burst pipes don't wait for 9am, and in the figures ServiceTitan's engineer cited above, the weekend is the worst part of the week.
- You're already on a call. Unless you break off the first conversation, the second caller never reaches you.
Those out-of-hours calls are also the ones that bill highest. Trustoo's price page gives an average plumbing hour of €40 to €80, a band it says comes from requests on its platform; its own rate table, which states no method, lists a weekend hour at €60 to €160 and a night or emergency hour at €80 to €160, twice the ordinary band. Homedeal's price guide puts the average emergency rate at €100 to €125 an hour.
A caller with water coming through the ceiling has a page of other plumbers on the same screen. By the time you're back in the van, the job may well be someone else's.
How do you count your own missed calls?
Open your phone's call log; that is most of the method. Three ways, from quickest to most accurate:
- Check your mobile. Count the missed and unanswered calls over the last week - and remember that this only counts the calls that reached your phone at all.
- Ask your provider. If you have a business line or a VoIP system, look for a missed-call report in its online account, or ask the provider for one.
- Track for two weeks. Note every call you couldn't take and whether they rang back. The ones who don't ring back are your leak.
On the figures ServiceTitan's engineer cited, two in five weekend calls to home-services firms go unanswered - and weekend work bills on a higher band than weekday work.
What is one missed call actually worth?
Roughly €20,100 of work a year, on the arithmetic below, for a plumber who misses five calls a week. That is under half of what you get by counting every missed call as a booked job.
That naive sum is five missed calls a week, times €180 a job, times 52 weeks: €46,800 a year. Big number, wrong number. ServiceTitan's data on more than 3,000 trade businesses using its software, in the United States and Canada, put plumbing's average call booking rate at 43% in June 2022 - the share of calls that became jobs, and the highest of the trades it reported that month. The page doesn't define which calls count in that total, the data is North American and four years old, and applying it to calls nobody answered is our own assumption. Still a far better yardstick than 100%:
| Calls you miss | Per year | Jobs, at a 43% booking rate (rounded) | At €180 a job |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 a week | 104 | 45 | €8,000 |
| 5 a week | 260 | 112 | €20,100 |
| 10 a week | 520 | 224 | €40,200 |
€180 is our own round figure for an ordinary repair. Trustoo's price tables put a blocked toilet at €80 to €200 and a leaking drain at €90 to €180; swap in your own average job and the shape holds.
Now put €20,100 in context. Knab's 2026 rate handbook, based on research among more than 20,000 self-employed workers in the Netherlands, puts the average self-employed plumber on €124,000 of revenue in 2025. Five missed calls a week is about two months of that, gone to a phone nobody answered.
And the first invoice is only the start of it. A customer who liked you may call again, and the review they leave can win you the next caller. We can't put a sourced number on that tail, so it stays out of the table - but it goes on the same unanswered ring.
What are your options for catching the calls you miss?
Four common ones, starting with the one you already have.
Voicemail. Already on your phone, and it hears from fewer than three in a hundred of the callers it picks up. Where the other 97% go instead is the part that costs you.
Call diversion to a mate or partner. Better than nothing, but you're handing your reputation to someone who may not know your diary or your prices. Setting up the divert is the easy part.
A human answering service. A real person picks up, which is worth something. Mijn Telefoniste, a Dutch service, charges a monthly fee plus a price per call beyond the included bundle, and says its telephonist can book an appointment for you as well as note a call-back request. We compared the trade-offs, with Dutch tariffs, in answering service vs AI receptionist.
An AI receptionist. This is what SwiftGuard builds: a voice agent that answers the calls you send it, day or night, and takes the caller's details and the problem. Once your Google Calendar is connected, it books the job into it while you keep working, after checking a new caller's number with a texted code; when it can't book the job, it takes a message so you can ring back.
Start by knowing your number
Before you spend a penny on any of this, do the two-week count. Once you can see how many calls slip through and roughly what they're worth, set that against what it costs to catch them.
When you're ready to plug the leak, see how the plans work and put your two-week count beside the price.