What missed calls cost a UK trades business

Start with what one job is worth

Two numbers set the size of the problem: how often the phone rings, and what an answered call is worth.

Checkatrade's 2026 price guides give usable benchmarks for both trades.

A plumber charges around £50 an hour, with an average day rate of £350. The average call-out charge is £110. Common jobs are priced individually: unblocking a toilet averages £100 (range £75 to £150), fixing a leak averages £100 (£77 to £128), repairing a burst water pipe around £150, installing a radiator averages £165 (£150 to £180), and replacing a water tank averages £405 (£360 to £450).

An electrician also charges around £50 an hour, with an average day rate of £400 and emergency work at roughly £90 an hour.

One answered call is a three-figure sum, and a handful of them a month is a real part of the year.

The figure nobody can look up

There is no official UK statistic for how many calls a trades business misses. We looked, and we could not find one.

The percentages and headline pound figures quoted online come from companies that sell call answering. We went looking for the method behind them and could not find one. The numbers may well be right, but they are unusable for your decision, because your call pattern sets your figure and an industry average does not.

The only input you can trust here is your own phone.

Count the calls you can actually see

You can measure this in an afternoon.

• Open your mobile call log, your phone bill, or the call report from your VoIP system if you use one.
• Take a normal fortnight. Not the week you went on holiday, not the week of the storm.
• Count the inbound calls from numbers you do not recognise. Those are the job enquiries.
• Count how many rang out without an answer.
• Count how many of those left a voicemail.
• Note how long it took you to call back.

That gives you a real missed-call count, and it is usually higher than the owner expects.

Be clear about what the count leaves out. A caller who rang, got no answer and dialled the next business on the search results page appears nowhere at all. No log records them, and anyone who gives you a precise number for them, including us, is guessing.

A worked estimate

Example calculation. The call counts below are the kind of numbers a two-person plumbing or electrical firm tends to see; substitute your own from the exercise above. The assumption on the third line is ours, and it is flagged as an assumption rather than a measurement.

• 12 inbound job enquiries a week.
• 3 of them ring out before anyone answers.
• Assume one in three of those callers rings someone else instead of calling back. This is the input you cannot check, so treat it as a dial you can turn.
• Average job value of £100, which is Checkatrade's average for fixing a leak as of June 2026.

At one in three, that is one lost job a week, about £430 a month, or a little over £5,000 a year. At two in three, it doubles.

Change any input and the answer changes. The method is worth more than the number, because the method runs on your data rather than an average.

There is a second cost that rarely gets counted. A caller who leaves a voicemail is not lost yet. They are lost when the callback takes four hours, by which time they have booked someone else. In a trade where the work is urgent, how fast you respond decides the job.

Why trades feel this more than other businesses

The pattern is not a mystery. The work is physical, so both hands are busy, and the phone rings hardest exactly when you cannot answer it. Enquiries arrive in bursts after a storm, a cold snap or a bank holiday weekend, which is when a one-person office is least able to absorb them.

The caller, meanwhile, is comparing several businesses and wants someone on site today. They are not sentimental about who they try second.

What matters is deciding in advance what happens to a call you cannot take.

The options, and what each one costs

• Answer everything yourself. Free, and impossible while you are up a ladder.
• Let it ring out and hope they call back. Free on paper, and the option that loses the most work.
• Send unanswered calls to voicemail. Better than nothing, but many callers hang up rather than record a message, and the ones who do leave one still wait for you.
• Pay someone else to answer. ReceptionHQ publishes call-answering plans starting at £15 a month, with £16 and £30 tiers above it depending on whether you want call transfers or CRM updates. Watch the per-minute rate once the included minutes run out, because a busy trade week can use them in a morning.
• Put an AI receptionist on the line. It answers on the first ring, asks the questions you set, takes the job details and sends them to you by text or email. Our own plans are £129 a month for Starter and £299 a month for Professional, with a hard daily spend cap of £5 on usage so a busy week cannot produce a surprise bill.

The trade-offs are worth saying plainly. An AI receptionist handles routine calls well: taking a message, qualifying an enquiry, booking an appointment, answering the same question for the tenth time. It is not a plumber, and it should not be inventing quotes. A complicated or sensitive conversation still needs you, and a good setup hands those calls over rather than pretending they went well.

What to do before you buy anything

• Count your missed calls for two weeks and write the number down.
• Work out your own average job value from your invoices, not from a price guide.
• Multiply. That figure is what the leak costs you each month.
• Then decide, with the number in front of you, whether to do nothing, hire an answering service, or put an assistant on the line.

We have not put a case study on this page, because we are a small studio and would rather show you the arithmetic and let you test the line yourself. Our AI receptionist answers the amoskalets phone number on +44 20 4577 1226, day and night. Ring it, ask it something awkward, and judge it on what you hear.

If you would rather have the workings done with you, the free AI Automation Audit at amoskalets.com/ai-audit is a 30-minute conversation about where calls and admin hours leak out of your business. You leave with a written map of what could be automated, whether you buy anything or not.