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Missed call statistics UK:
what's actually evidenced
Almost every page selling a missed-call product quotes the same handful of numbers, and almost none of them say where those numbers came from. We went looking for the sources. Some hold up. Some turn out to be American, or a decade old, or run by a company selling call handling. One of them has no source at all.
So this page is organised by how good the evidence is rather than by how good the number sounds. If you need a figure you can defend, take one from the first section and cite the regulator rather than us.
Last reviewed
Figures with a primary UK source
Ofcom is the UK communications regulator. Its Communications Market Report is an annual measurement of the actual market rather than a survey, and it is published in full with its methodology. This is the strongest evidence available on any of this.
6%
fall in total UK fixed and mobile call minutes during 2023, to 188 billion minutes
Ofcom is the UK communications regulator and this is its own annual measurement of the market, not a survey commissioned by a vendor. It is the most solid ground on this page.
13%
fall in UK SMS and MMS volumes over the same period, as messaging moved to apps
Worth knowing if you are relying on SMS: person-to-person texting is declining, while application-to-person messaging of the kind a business sends is not the same market.
52 + 12
consumers and micro-business decision-makers interviewed by Ofcom about why UK call volumes are falling
Qualitative research with a small sample. Useful for understanding why behaviour is changing; not a source for a percentage, and it should not be quoted as one.
Source: Ofcom, Declining calls and changing behaviour (fieldwork September 2019, published August 2020)
Figures you should be careful with
These are the numbers this industry runs on. They are not necessarily wrong — they are just not evidence, and they disagree with each other badly enough that at most one of them can be right. If you are about to put one in a pitch deck, this is the section to read first.
80%
of callers will not leave a voicemail
Widely repeated, no traceable primary study
The single most quoted number in this market. We went looking for the study behind it and could not find one — and published figures for the same claim range from 42% to 90% depending on which secondary source you read, almost all of them US surveys rather than UK ones. A range that wide is not a measurement.
42%
of consumers say they leave a voicemail when a call goes unanswered — implying 58% do not
Named vendor survey, US, 1,000 respondents
Attributed to a CallRail consumer survey. A named study with a stated sample is better evidence than an unattributed round number, but it is a vendor survey in a market where the vendor sells call handling, and it is not UK data.
67%
of callers who reach voicemail will not leave a message
Attributed to BIA/Kelsey; original publication not locatable
Cited constantly, always second-hand. BIA/Kelsey is a real research firm, but we could not find the report, its date or its methodology — which means nobody quoting it can tell you whether it describes 2011 or 2021.
45 seconds
before an unanswered caller rings a competitor
No source found at all
The one figure here with nothing behind it at all. No study, no survey, not even a first-hand assertion — only marketing pages quoting other marketing pages. If you see it presented as research, the page you are reading has not checked it.
Why we don't quote these
You will not find any of the figures above on the rest of this site. Quoting an untraceable number to sell something is what turned them into untraceable numbers in the first place, and a claim you cannot source is a claim you cannot defend when a customer asks.
The argument does not need them. A caller who hangs up leaves you nothing to work with — no name, no reason for the call, no way to tell what you lost. Anyone with a phone can verify that, and it is the whole case.
Things you can check yourself
No study required for any of these. They are properties of how UK mobile networks work, and you can confirm them from your own handset.
15s
roughly how long a UK mobile rings before the network decides the call is unanswered and applies your divert rule
This is a network setting rather than a survey finding. It varies a little by operator and some networks let you change it in five-second steps; you can read your own with *#61#.
0
pieces of information a business gets from a caller who hangs up rather than leaving a message
Not a statistic, an observation — and the actual mechanism behind the argument. A missed call with no voicemail leaves a number in your log and nothing else: no name, no reason for the call, and no way to tell a small job from a large one.
4
GSM conditions a UK line can divert on: no answer, busy, unreachable, and all calls
Fixed by the GSM standard rather than by any operator, which is why the same dial codes work across every UK network.
Citing this page
You are welcome to link to it. If you want to use one of the Ofcom figures, cite Ofcom rather than us — the report is free, public and more authoritative than a page on a vendor's website will ever be.
One request: if you use anything from the second section, keep the qualification attached. Republishing those figures bare is how they ended up in this state.
If you know the primary source for any of the figures in the second section, we would genuinely like to see it — email us and we will update the page and say who found it.
Related guides
The part that isn't disputed
A caller who hangs up on your voicemail leaves you nothing. A text from your business name gives them a reason to wait.
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