Most people who ring your business and reach voicemail will hang up without saying a word. That is not a slight on your greeting. It is a behaviour shift that has been building for a decade, and it means the voicemail box you check every couple of days is no longer a record of who tried to reach you. It is a record of the small minority who were willing to wait.
In short: Published figures on voicemail vary from under 5% to about 42%, and that spread tells you more than any single number. The majority of first-time callers who hit voicemail do not leave a message. Most of them ring somebody else instead, usually within minutes, and you never find out it happened.
Do customers leave voicemails for businesses anymore?
Rarely, and the research is a mess.
A 2025 CallRail survey of 1,000 US consumers found 42% said they would leave a voicemail for a business. Hiya's State of the Call research puts the hang-up rate above 80%. A frequently quoted study by 411 Locals, which monitored 85 businesses across 58 industries for 30 days, found those businesses answered only 37.8% of incoming calls, with a similar share going to voicemail and roughly a quarter getting no response at all. Other figures floating around claim fewer than 3% of callers leave a message.
Those numbers cannot all be right. Before you build a decision on any of them, it is worth knowing why they disagree.
Why the voicemail statistics contradict each other
Three reasons, and once you see them you will read every one of these stats differently.
They measure different moments. A survey asks people what they think they would do. Call-tracking data records what they actually did. People consistently overestimate their own patience, which is why survey figures like CallRail's 42% sit so far above observed hang-up rates.
They mix caller types. Your supplier ringing about an invoice behaves nothing like a stranger who found you on Google ninety seconds ago. Studies that pool both get a middling number that describes neither. The stranger is the one costing you money.
Most of them are marketing. Nearly every widely circulated missed-call statistic is published by a company selling missed-call software. That does not automatically make the number wrong, but it does mean nobody is incentivised to publish the unflattering version. We are in that business too, which is exactly why this article names the sources and lets you weigh them.
The useful takeaway is not a percentage. It is the direction, which every source agrees on: the majority of first-time callers who reach voicemail do not leave a message.
Where those callers actually go
They ring the next number on the list.
For urgent or commoditised work, this is almost mechanical. Someone with a blocked drain, a dead hot water system or a lockout has a search results page open with five businesses on it. Your voicemail is not competing with their patience. It is competing with the next three phone numbers, and those are one tap away.
For specialised or referred work the behaviour changes. If a client has been told to ring you specifically, they will usually try again. That is worth knowing, because it means the damage from missed calls is concentrated in exactly the enquiries you paid to generate: the ones from search, ads and your Google Business Profile.
If you want a rough sense of what that costs you, our missed call calculator runs the numbers on your own volumes rather than an industry average.
What changed, in Australian terms
Australians did not consciously decide to abandon voicemail. They changed how they use the phone, and voicemail was collateral.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority tracks this every year. In its 2026 report on how Australians communicate, the ACMA found 83% of Australians had used at least one app to send messages or make voice or video calls in the previous six months, a figure that has held steady since 2023. Landline use among Australians aged 75 and over fell to 34% in 2025, down from 45% the year before. Even among Australians aged 65 to 74, 47% made a voice call through an app, up from 38% a year earlier.
The ACMA's own summary of the trend is that mobile and internet-based communication keeps growing while fixed-line use falls, and that the shift now runs through every age group rather than just the young.
Read that alongside the voicemail data and the picture makes sense. The generation most loyal to voicemail is the generation moving fastest onto apps. Everyone else stopped years ago.
Voicemail versus text-back versus a live answer
Three options, and they are not equivalent.
Voicemail asks the caller to do the most work at the point they are least invested. They have to compose a message, say their number clearly, and then wait an unknown length of time. It still catches regulars, suppliers and people who genuinely prefer to talk. It does not reliably catch a stranger.
An automatic text-back lands on the device already in their hand. There is nothing to compose, they can reply whenever suits, and you get a written record with a number attached. It does not answer their question, but it stops the call being a dead end. If that is the gap you are closing, a custom automation that texts them back is the narrow fix.
A live answer is still the strongest, because it resolves the enquiry rather than deferring it. The catch is that a human cannot cover 7pm on a Saturday without you paying for 7pm on a Saturday. That is the actual reason an AI receptionist exists, and we have written a fuller comparison of virtual receptionist services in Australia if you want the options side by side.
There is no universal right answer. There is a right answer for how urgent your work is and how much of your enquiry volume arrives outside business hours.
How to find out what this is costing you
Stop estimating and pull the log.
Almost every business phone plan and VoIP service can report answered versus unanswered calls. Ask your provider for a full month, broken down by hour, including after-hours and weekends. Then compare the unanswered count against how many voicemails you actually received. The gap between those two figures is the population this article is about, and it is usually the first time an owner sees it written down.
Two things tend to surprise people. The first is the volume outside 9 to 5. The second is that repeat callers barely register, because the people who keep trying are the ones you were never at risk of losing.
If the number is uncomfortable, that is useful information rather than a reason to buy something. Our guide to missed call automation for small business covers what to do about it without assuming the answer is software.
What to take from this
Nobody leaves voicemails anymore is a slight exaggeration. Enough people do that the box is not empty, which is precisely why the problem hides so well. An owner checks voicemail, sees three messages, and concludes three people rang. The call log says thirty did.
The fix is not necessarily technology. Sometimes it is a diverted number, a shared roster, or simply admitting that the phone is a channel you are not covering and choosing a different one to promote. What does not work is treating your voicemail box as a measurement of demand, because it stopped being one some time ago.
If you want to know what your own numbers look like before deciding anything, get in touch and we will read the call log with you.
Related reading
Founder, LUNA Systems · Registered Nurse (AHPRA: NMW0002113429)
Former nurse and beauty therapist turned automation consultant. Justine builds custom AI systems for Australian service businesses, so they can stop chasing leads and start growing.
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