What missed calls cost your business can only be estimated from your own call log. We have not found reliable figures on how many calls go unanswered in the skilled trades (Handwerk) or how many callers then ring the next firm. With four numbers from your own business you can still arrive at a lower bound, calculated as margin, not revenue.

Why tradespeople miss calls

Nobody standing on a roof, lying under a sink or cutting tiles answers the phone. That has little to do with discipline. In a business where the owner works on the job too, it’s simply normal.

Not every missed call hides a job, though. It helps to separate the calls:

Lost jobs from missed calls: what we know and what we don’t

Percentages circulate online on how many callers leave no message or go straight to the next firm. For this article we tried to trace them back to their source. What we found were figures from vendors of such solutions, figures without a date, and an often-quoted rule of thumb from a 2007 trade article that names no study. We did not find a traceable study of trade businesses, so we give no such figure here. If someone quotes you one, ask for the source.

What you can know for certain is how many calls in your call log went unanswered. That is something you can calculate with.

Lost revenue or lost margin? Your calculation in four steps

The formula we use:

Missed calls per day × 20 working days × 5 % × average job value × contribution margin rate = lost margin per month

  1. Count. For two to four weeks, note from the call log on your mobile or your phone system how many calls went unanswered during business hours. Divide the total by the number of working days. That’s your figure for missed calls per day. Don’t estimate it from memory.
  2. Scale it up to a month: times 20 working days.
  3. Apply the share that would have turned into a job: 5 %. This is not a measured industry rate; we have not found one (see above). The 5 % is a deliberately low floor. It is meant to stop the calculation from overstating the loss.
  4. Convert to margin: times average job value, times contribution margin rate (Deckungsbeitragssatz). The contribution margin is what’s left of the job value after materials and other directly attributable costs. Your bookkeeping or your tax adviser will know your rate. If you don’t know it, use 30 % as an assumption and replace it later.

Why margin rather than revenue? A job that doesn’t happen also costs you no materials and no subcontracting. What you actually miss is the contribution margin. If you calculate with revenue, you get a bigger number that would never have reached your account.

Here is what that looks like with example values. These are example values, not industry figures:

StepExample valueResult
Missed calls per day (counted)2
× 20 working days40 missed calls per month
× 5 %2 jobs
× average job value€1,500€3,000 revenue
× contribution margin rate30 % (assumption)€900 margin per month

A note so the figures on this website don’t seem to contradict each other: the calculator on our AI phone assistant page shows lost revenue and works with different assumptions. The two results measure different things. For the question of what you actually end up missing, margin is what counts.

This calculation is exactly the first question on our free 12-minute worksheet (12-Minuten-Rechnung, in German). It has twelve questions in four blocks and, besides missed calls during business hours, also asks about emergency calls after hours and quotes that were never followed up. On the back there is a threshold for the total of the result boxes: from €500 a month, it’s worth thinking further.

The market in 2026: why every enquiry counts

The ZDH (German Confederation of Skilled Crafts) counts exactly 1,038,126 trade businesses as of 31 December 2025 and estimates 2025 turnover at €783 billion excluding VAT, 1.2 % more than the previous year in nominal terms (as of June 2026).

The order situation has worsened in 2026, however. In its economic report (Konjunkturbericht) for the second quarter of 2026 (August 2026), the ZDH reports:

The Deutsche Handwerks Zeitung, a German trade newspaper, wrote on 12 August 2026 that in more and more regions and trades “the golden days of full capacity are over for now”. It went on: “In many tradespeople’s calendars, gaps are appearing for the first time” (our translation).

On staffing, things look somewhat better than the year before. According to KOFA Kompakt 07/2026 from the IW Köln (German Economic Institute, Cologne), there were just under 210,000 vacancies in skilled-trade occupations in 2025 and around 140,000 unemployed tradespeople looking for a job. The difference is not the gap, though, because occupations are not interchangeable: a roofer, for example, cannot work as an optician. Taking that into account, KOFA calculates that just under 100,000 positions, almost one in two, could not be filled because there were no matching unemployed people anywhere in Germany. 59 of 115 trade occupations had a shortage. The skilled-labour gap did, however, shrink by 9.5 % in 2025.

For your phone, this means: as order books get thinner, every enquiry that gets lost weighs more heavily than in times of full capacity.

Right now, without AI: five measures

Before you spend money on technology, it’s worth looking at what can be done with little effort.

  1. Call forwarding. Forward your landline to a mobile when nobody is in the office, or when nobody picks up after a few rings. Check with your phone provider or in the manual for your phone system how to set it up and whether it costs anything. Forwarding only helps if the mobile is with someone who can answer right then.
  2. A short voicemail greeting. Our recommendation: short and friendly, with a promise of when you’ll call back, and asking only for name and number. For example: “Hello, this is [your business]. We’re on a job right now. Please leave your name and number, and we’ll call you back today by 5 pm.” We know of no reliable study on how many callers then actually say something.
  3. Fixed callback times. Set two or three fixed times a day when the voicemail gets worked through, and name them in the greeting. We know of no evidence-based deadline for when a callback has to happen. What matters is that the promise in the greeting holds.
  4. An answering service. An external service takes calls in your name. Prices and billing models vary, so get several quotes. Clarify beforehand whether the service only takes messages or can also book appointments, otherwise the callback still lands with you.
  5. An office or part-time hire. They can take calls and handle quotes, invoices and appointments on the side. This creates fixed costs, even in quiet weeks, and you need cover for holidays and sickness.

The first three points can usually be put in place with what you already have. Then count again for two to four weeks. If the number of missed calls drops noticeably, you may not need anything else.

When more makes sense

An AI phone assistant may make sense if the total of the result boxes on your 12-minute worksheet is above the €500-a-month threshold and the measures above aren’t enough, for example because many calls come in at times when nobody can call back. If the total stays well below €500 a month, call forwarding, a greeting and fixed callback times are the better route.

What such an assistant does is described on the AI phone assistant page. What the costs depend on is explained in the article What does an AI phone assistant cost?, and current prices are on the pricing page. The trade-off against a human answering service is in the comparison of AI phone assistant vs. answering service.

If you’d like to put your own number into context, book a free initial call (30 minutes, a first assessment).

This article is general guidance (as of 20 October 2026) for businesses in Germany and is not legal or tax advice.

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