How long will a customer wait on hold?

Hold queues sound like something that happens to banks, energy companies and councils. Small businesses have them too. They just look different: "can you bear with me a second", a phone left on the counter, a call parked while someone checks the diary, or a line that rings and rings because the one person who answers it is already on another call.

How long will a caller put up with that?

Two minutes, according to one company

OnSIP, a US business phone provider, publishes a figure on its own site: 66% of customers are only willing to wait on hold for two minutes. The same page says 34% of those who hang up before reaching someone will never call back.

OnSIP gives no date, sample size or method for those numbers, so they are best read as one company's figure rather than settled fact. We include them because they are quoted everywhere, usually credited to someone else, and OnSIP is where they actually come from.

Waiting is a reason people give up

The firmer evidence is from the UK. MaxContact, a UK contact-centre software company, surveyed more than 1,000 UK consumers who had dealt with a contact centre in the previous 18 months for its Voice of the UK Consumer 2025 report. 55% cited excessive wait times as a reason for abandoning a call. And 42% said they would pay extra for guaranteed shorter waits.

That second figure deserves a moment. People are telling a researcher that time on hold is worth money to them. For a small business that is a helpful way to see it: every minute a caller spends waiting is something they are paying, and they will weigh it against the next business they could ring.

MaxContact sells call-centre software, so it has a commercial interest in the subject. It is still one of the better UK sources on what callers will tolerate.

What a long wait looks like

For a sense of how bad it can get, Citizens Advice monitored energy suppliers' phone lines at the end of 2021. The average wait was 340 seconds, more than five minutes, up from around four minutes a year earlier. Customers of the poorest performers faced waits of around 15 minutes.

Those are large companies, in a regulated sector, during an energy crisis, and the figures are several years old. They are useful for one reason. An energy customer with a problem often cannot simply go elsewhere that afternoon, so they wait. Your customers usually can. A plumber, a salon or a solicitor's office gets none of that captive patience. If one business keeps a caller hanging on, the next one in the search results is a tap away.

Hold in a small business

The awkward thing about hold in a small business is that nobody plans it. It happens because the person who answers is already on a call, or the question needs someone who is out, or the diary lives on another screen or in another person's head. Each time it feels like a few seconds. To the caller it is dead air.

A few habits keep it short:

1. If you need more than a few seconds, say so, and offer to ring back at a specific time instead of leaving the caller listening to silence.
2. Take the caller's name and number before you put them on hold, so a dropped call does not become a lost customer.
3. When you promise a callback, make it at the time you said. A missed callback undoes the good of offering one.
4. If two calls regularly arrive together at certain times of day, plan for those times: a second person on the phones, or somewhere for the overflow to go.

Reading the numbers together

The three sources vary in quality. OnSIP's two-minute figure has no method behind it on its own page. MaxContact's is a proper UK survey from a company with an interest in call handling. Citizens Advice is independent monitoring of one sector. Read together, they say something plain: waiting is where callers drop away, and a fair number of the people who drop away do not come back.

If calls to your business stack up at busy times, Ringar AI can answer the ones nobody is free for, take the details and arrange a callback, so the second caller is not left waiting while you deal with the first.