How many restaurant calls go unanswered? Where the popular numbers come from

The numbers at a glance

We read each page on 2026-10-07 and followed every citation link to its end.

Is it true that restaurants miss 43% of their calls?

We could not find a measurement behind it. The claim usually reads: “43% of restaurant phone calls go unanswered, costing the average venue up to $292,000 annually.” Two trails lead from it.

• Trail 1. A Hostie article dated July 13, 2025 credits both numbers to a Slang AI page. That Slang AI page is dated July 25, 2022. We downloaded it and searched the text. Neither “43%” nor “292” appears in it. The same article also credits the 43% to “the February 2025 Breez study”, with no link. We searched for it and found only pages repeating the claim.
• Trail 2. Toast’s guide to restaurant answering services says “industry studies show restaurants fail to answer 43% of their calls.” The link goes to a ReachifyAI blog post dated August 15, 2025. ReachifyAI sells an AI answering service. Its post states the 43% and the $292,000 with no source link.

ReachifyAI’s own arithmetic does not support $292,000. The post assumes 150 to 200 calls a week, with 65 to 86 of them unanswered. That is 3,380 to 4,472 missed calls a year. Dividing $292,000 by those counts gives $65 to $86 per missed call, with every missed call treated as a lost sale.

The same post’s “conservative” example copies the arithmetic of a HungerRush post (more on it below) ($25 an order, $2,250 a month, $27,000 a year) but leaves out HungerRush’s assumption that 60% of missed callers would have ordered. With that assumption, HungerRush values a missed call at $15, so the $292,000 headline assumes four to six times HungerRush’s per-call value.

Do 58% of restaurant calls go unanswered?

This number comes from a poll. Hostie’s release of July 27, 2025 reports an online survey run by The Harris Poll for Hostie. It covered 2,065 U.S. adults between May 29 and June 2, 2025, with a stated precision of plus or minus 2.5 points.

The release says 63% of Americans prefer to phone a restaurant, and “in many cases (58%), those calls go unanswered.” It does not publish the question wording.

A poll of adults counts people, not calls. So the 58% describes how many respondents recall going unanswered, at some frequency. The same release reports that 20% say their calls are “always/often ignored.” Its other headline, 69% likely to give up on a restaurant that does not answer, is a stated intention, not observed behavior.

What does measured call data show?

Two vendors publish figures drawn from their own call data. Both sell AI phone answering.

Revmo. A press release dated August 6, 2026 describes 12,091 restaurant call recordings. It reports these answer rates by segment:

• Quick service: 59.9% answered, 40.1% missed
• Fast casual: 75.3% answered, 24.8% missed
• Full service: 91.0% answered, 9.0% missed
• Pizza: 93.1% answered

The release says data collection covered “multiple time zones, dayparts, and seasonal periods.” It does not say who placed the calls, how many restaurants or brands were covered, or when the calls were made. It gives “$73,000 per location” as the annual loss for quick service, with no assumptions shown. Its “$3.65 million” for a 50-location chain is that figure times 50. The full PDF report did not load for us.

Maple. A report dated December 7, 2025 covers 1.2 million calls answered by Maple at 1,000+ U.S. locations, from December 2023 to November 2025. Its headline is “Restaurants miss 33% of incoming calls during peak service hours.”

Maple’s methodology note is candid about that figure. It says missed-call estimates before Maple “are based on merchant self-reporting during onboarding surveys and discovery calls.” It adds that the data “may not be representative of all U.S. restaurants.” So the 1.2 million calls are calls Maple answered. The 33% is what owners told Maple when they signed up.

The dollar figures on the page do not line up with each other. The headline values an unanswered call at $85. The revenue table lists 85 missed calls a month and $4,200 at risk, which works out to about $49 a call. The same table values a reservation call at $134.

Hostie’s “500k-call” dataset. Hostie cites a dataset of more than 500,000 calls on several pages, each with a different starting point:

• One page, dated September 17, 2025, puts the pre-AI missed rate at 65%.
• Another, dated August 31, 2025, says 36%.
• A third, dated October 8, 2025, says 23% at lunch.

Two of the pages have a short “Methodology and Scope” section, but none says how a missed call was counted, which restaurants were included or how the pre-AI rate was measured, so we did not count them as measurements.

Where does “$27,000 a year” come from?

It comes from a worked example. A HungerRush post from October 2, 2023 says the average quick-service restaurant gets 50 to 75 calls a day. It then writes: “Let’s estimate that 10% of your calls are lost.” From there it gets 150 missed calls a month, 60% of which might have ordered, at $25 each. That comes to $2,250 a month, or “over $27,000 a year.” HungerRush sells AI phone ordering.

The example then became a statistic. A column on the Washington Hospitality Association site, dated June 2, 2025, states that “restaurants miss an average of 150 calls per month.” It is bylined to the founder and CEO of MaskdAI, which sells an AI receptionist. Its link to HungerRush carries the tag utm_source=chatgpt.com. ReachifyAI’s post repeats the same $25 and $27,000 arithmetic.

What about the 60% and 13% figures?

• 60% unanswered. In a September 2021 TechCrunch article, the reporter wrote that Goodcall’s CEO started the company after “recognizing the call problem, noting that in fact 60% of the calls that come into merchants go unanswered.” No source is given. Goodcall’s restaurant answering page carries no missed-call percentage.
• 13% of business lost. Toast’s guide says a “Cornell University Hospitality Research study” found restaurants lose about 13% of potential business to mishandled calls. That link goes to a Callin post. Callin sells AI phone answering. The Callin post links to the index page of Cornell’s hospitality research publications, not to a study. It names no title, year or author, so we could not check it.

Slang AI’s own 2025 report announcement gives no missed-call rate. It says about 71% of calls are “directly tied to revenue,” from “millions of calls” with no exact count.

Why do the numbers disagree?

• Polls versus logs. The 58% counts people. Revmo counts calls.
• Restaurant type. Revmo’s own spread runs from 9% missed at full service to 40% at quick service. A single “restaurants miss X%” hides a fourfold range.
• Peak versus all day. Maple’s 33% is for peak hours only.
• Who is in the sample. Maple says its customers may differ from non-users. A restaurant that signs up for AI answering may well have had a phone problem to begin with.
• Value per call. Published values per missed call range from $15 (HungerRush’s worked example) to $134 (Maple’s reservation call). The dollar totals depend mostly on that one assumption.

How to check your own missed-call rate

Your own numbers will beat any vendor’s average. If your phone provider or POS keeps a call log, export two weeks of it. Divide the inbound calls that rang out or went to voicemail by all inbound calls, separately for lunch, dinner and closed hours. Then value a missed call with your own figures: the share of calls that are orders or bookings, times your average ticket.

To compare answering tools, see AI voice agents. Our reviews of Slang AI, Goodcall and Smith.ai list each plan’s price and what it includes. Restaurant platforms are compared in restaurant marketing, including Popmenu, Owner.com and Toast Marketing.

Numbers we left out

We dropped any figure whose source we could not open on 2026-10-07:

• Revmo’s full PDF report, and the “5.5 rings” claim that search results attribute to it. The PDF host refused the connection.
• A “49% less likely to dine” figure on Popmenu’s blog. The page returned HTTP 403.
• The “62% of small-business calls go unanswered” figure credited to 411 Locals. We did not reach the original study.