A home service company’s booking rate depends on three things that happen in order. The call has to be answered, the caller has to need a job done, and the person on the phone has to schedule it. Avidus took the most recent published averages for each of these steps and worked out what they mean together for every 100 calls a company receives.
All starting figures come from the Invoca Home Services Lead Conversion Benchmarks Report 2026, published in July 2026. Invoca based the report on anonymized calls tracked on its platform across nine home service segments, including HVAC, plumbing, construction, and restoration. Its figures are averages across Invoca’s customer base.
Avidus multiplied these averages together to estimate booked jobs per 100 inbound calls, then changed one rate at a time to see how much each step affects the result. Because the inputs are averages, the results describe a typical company in the dataset. Individual companies will see different numbers.
| Step | Invoca 2026 average |
|---|---|
| Calls answered by a person | 52% of all inbound calls |
| Answered calls that are leads | 38% |
| Leads that book on the call | 45% |
Applying those three rates in order gives the following:
| Stage | Calls remaining |
|---|---|
| Inbound calls | 100 |
| Answered by a person | 52 |
| Answered calls that are leads | 19.8 |
| Leads that book on the call | 8.9 |
At these averages, about 9 of every 100 inbound calls end in a booked job during the call.
Next, Avidus raised each rate by 5 percentage points on its own and recalculated.
| Change | Booked jobs per 100 calls |
Increase over 8.9 |
|---|---|---|
| Answer rate from 52% to 57% | 9.8% | 9.6% |
| Lead rate from 38% to 43% | 10.1% | 13.2% |
| Booking rate from 45% to 50% | 9.9% | 11.1% |
| All three together | 12.3% | 37.8% |
The combined result matches Invoca’s own estimate that raising all three rates by 5 points would produce roughly 38% more conversions from the same call volume.
Each step is usually managed by a different part of the business. Lead rate depends mostly on marketing, since it reflects who is calling. Answer rate depends on phone coverage and staffing. Booking rate depends on how calls are handled once someone picks up.
The 52% answer rate includes misdials and very short calls. Invoca also reported that 65% of calls longer than 15 seconds and 73% of calls longer than 30 seconds were answered by a person.
Answer rates also differed by segment, from 32% in the lowest segment to 74% in the highest. Holding the lead and booking rates at the overall averages, that range works out to:
| Answer rate | Booked jobs per 100 calls |
|---|---|
| 32% (lowest segment) | 5.5 |
| 52% (all segments) | 8.9 |
| 74% (highest segment) | 12.7 |
Lead and booking rates also vary by segment, so this table shows the effect of answer rate alone.
Invoca reviewed how calls were handled as well as whether they were answered. It found that 55% of home service businesses did not ask leads to buy or book the job.
Booking rate is the step most directly tied to what is said on the call. One way companies address it is with a call script that includes an offer to schedule and a list of open appointment times the agent can share.
Invoca also broke out results by the source of the call. Paid search calls had the highest booking rate of any channel at 48%. Calls referred by ChatGPT had the highest lead rate at 45%, with a booking rate of 41%. Invoca noted that the total number of calls coming from AI search is still small.
Avidus provides live call answering and booking for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and other home service companies in the United States and Canada. Our team is based in the Philippines and is trained on your services, service area, and booking process before taking calls, including how you want agents to offer appointment times. Agents book jobs directly into the field service software you already use.
If you would like to see what live call answering and booking could cost for your call volume, the Avidus calculator gives you an estimate.