Lead response time,
with the sources attached.
Every published response-time figure we can stand behind, each one carrying its study, its year and its sample size. Where we cannot verify a source, the line says so. None of these are our results — they are the market's.
Last reviewed July 2026. Quote anything here freely, but quote it with its original study attached rather than with our name on it. If a figure below is wrong, or you can source one of the unverified lines properly, write to support@leadsapp.com and we will correct the page.
The numbers
How long businesses actually take to answer an inbound inquiry, and what the published data says that delay is worth.
Median time to a first response on an inbound B2B lead.
Source: Artemis GTM speed-to-lead benchmark, 2026 — 253,817 inbound leads across 1,247 companies.
Share of companies that answer within five minutes.
Source: Artemis GTM speed-to-lead benchmark, 2026 — 253,817 inbound leads across 1,247 companies.
The sample behind this individual cut is not broken out separately in the figures we hold.
Lead conversion for companies replying inside five minutes, against companies replying after 24 hours — roughly nine times better.
Source: Artemis GTM speed-to-lead benchmark, 2026 — 253,817 inbound leads across 1,247 companies.
A comparison between two groups of companies, not a controlled experiment. Firms that answer in five minutes tend to be better organised in other ways too, so not all of that gap is caused by speed on its own.
Companies that do NOT reply within one hour.
Source: Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 US companies.
The most miscited number in this category. The correction is below.
Companies that never reply at all.
Source: Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 US companies. The same audit that produced the 63% figure.
Share of high-intent inquiries that arrive in the evening or at the weekend.
Source: Inbound-timing research.
Directional only. We cannot tie this one to a named publisher with a stated sample, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a precise figure.
The 63% figure is routinely miscited
You will see “63% of companies never respond to leads” repeated across blog posts, sales decks and vendor landing pages. It is a misreading of a single real number, and the misreading has been copied for years.
What the Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 US companies actually found: 63% did not respond within one hour. Not never — within an hour. Those are very different claims about the same companies, and the second one is far more damning than the truth requires.
In the same audit, the share of companies that never replied at all is about 23%. That is still close to a quarter of businesses ignoring somebody who raised their hand, which is bad enough without inflating it.
We are not above this: our own homepage carried the “never reply” version of the 63% figure until we caught it and corrected it in July 2026. Being the page that fixes the citation is more useful than being the page that repeats it.
Law firms, measured separately
Legal intake is one of the few verticals with repeated response-time research of its own, and the one where the cost of a missed inquiry is easiest to price. Firms have got materially faster since 2021 — while a quarter of them still answer nothing at all.
Median first response by a law firm to a new inquiry in 2025 — down from 25 to 33 minutes in 2021.
Source: 2025 law-firm intake research; the 2021 range is the earlier reading quoted for comparison.
Sample size is not stated in the figures we hold.
Law firms that never respond to an inquiry at all.
Source: 2025 law-firm intake research.
Sample size is not stated in the figures we hold.
Average cost of acquiring one law-firm lead.
Source: 2025 law-firm intake research.
Sample size is not stated in the figures we hold.
Read those three together: a firm paying around $649 for an inquiry, and never answering roughly a quarter of them, is throwing away real money at the last inch of a marketing spend it already committed to.
Leads do not arrive during office hours
More than 40% of high-intent inquiries land in the evening or at the weekend. That single fact explains most of the distance between a firm’s believed response time and its measured one: the office-hours median can look respectable while the Friday-evening inquiry waits until Monday, and the median across everything is what the buyer experiences.
Source: Inbound-timing research. Directional only — we cannot tie this figure to a named publisher with a stated sample, and we would rather flag that than dress it up.
How to measure your own response time
Thirty minutes with a spreadsheet gets you a number you can put next to the benchmarks above. Most owners are surprised, and the surprise is almost always in the same two places.
- 01
Pull the last 30 days of inquiries
Every inbound email and form submission, from every source. Not a sample — the whole month, or the number will flatter you.
- 02
Record two timestamps per inquiry
When it arrived, and when a human first replied. An automatic acknowledgement is not a first response — count those separately if you want, but they do not start a conversation.
- 03
Take the median, never the average
One inquiry answered a week late drags a mean into fiction. The median is the number the benchmarks use, which is also the only way to compare yourself to them.
- 04
Split the set by arrival time
Office hours in one pile, evenings and weekends in the other. The second pile is usually where a good-looking median falls apart.
- 05
Count the ones that got nothing
Inquiries that never received any reply. In the Harvard Business Review audit that share was about 23% of companies; most firms guess their own number is zero, and it rarely is.
Once you have your median, our speed-to-lead ROI calculator puts it against this curve and shows its full working. No email required.
Questions people actually ask
Is it true that 63% of companies never respond to a lead?+
No — that is a misreading of a real figure. The Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 US companies found that 63% did not respond within one hour. It did not find that they never responded. In that same audit, the share of companies that never responded at all is about 23%. If you see “63% never reply” quoted anywhere, it is wrong — including on this website, where we had it wrong ourselves until we corrected it in July 2026.
What counts as a good lead response time?+
Under five minutes is where the measured advantage sits: in the 2026 Artemis GTM benchmark of 253,817 inbound leads, companies replying inside five minutes converted 21% of leads against 2.3% for companies replying after 24 hours. Only about 7% of companies manage five minutes, and the median first response across that benchmark is 42 hours — so replying inside an hour already puts you ahead of the 63% of companies in the Harvard Business Review audit that did not.
How do I measure my own lead response time?+
Take the last 30 days of inbound inquiries and record two timestamps for each: when it arrived, and when a human first replied. Take the median rather than the average, because one inquiry answered a week late will drag a mean badly. Count automatic acknowledgements separately — they do not start a conversation. Then split the set by arrival time, since evenings and weekends are usually where a good median falls apart, and count the inquiries that never got any reply at all.
Does replying faster actually cause more sales?+
The honest answer is that the published data is observational, not experimental. The 21%-versus-2.3% gap compares companies that reply quickly with companies that reply slowly; firms that answer in five minutes tend to be better organised in other ways too, so some of that gap belongs to those other things rather than to speed. The direction is consistent across the studies we can source, and the mechanism is not mysterious — a buyer who has already spoken to someone else is harder to win — but treat the size of the effect as an estimate rather than a guarantee.
Sources, and how to cite this
- Artemis GTM speed-to-lead benchmark, 2026 — 253,817 inbound leads across 1,247 companies. The 42-hour median, the ~7% five-minute share, and the 21% versus 2.3% conversion comparison.
- Harvard Business Review audit of 2,241 US companies — the 63% who did not reply within an hour, and the ~23% who never replied.
- 2025 law-firm intake research — the 13-minute median, the 2021 comparison, the 26% never-respond share, and the ~$649 cost per lead. Sample size not stated in the figures we hold.
Where a line on this page does not name a publisher or a sample size, it is because we have not verified it to that level. We would rather show the gap than fill it in. Nothing here is LeadsApp’s own performance data.
“Lead response time statistics”, LeadsApp, last reviewed July 2026.
https://leadsapp.com/lead-response-statistics
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