Missed Calls
What Is Hold Time?
Hold time is how long a caller spends waiting on the line without talking to anyone. It includes time in a queue before a person answers and time placed on hold during the call. It is measured in seconds, and it is the single biggest reason callers hang up. Every second on hold raises the chance the caller leaves.
Key Takeaways
- Hold time covers waiting before the call is answered and mid-call holds.
- It is the main driver of call abandonment.
- 60% of callers hang up once hold time passes one minute, and more than 90% are gone by five minutes.
- Average speed of answer is one piece of hold time, but not all of it.
- An AI receptionist has no queue and no hold, so hold time is effectively zero.
How Hold Time Works
Hold time is every stretch of a call where the caller is waiting with nobody on the line. It has two parts:
- Before the call is answered. The caller is in a call queue, listening to music or a message, waiting for a person.
- During the call. The person who answered says "let me put you on hold for a second" to check something or find someone.
Phone systems track both. The first part, averaged across answered calls, is average speed of answer. The second part shows up as mid-call hold in your call reports. Add them together and you have the caller's real experience of waiting.
Example of Hold Time
A customer calls a plumbing company at 8:05 am. Every line is busy, so she waits in the queue for 50 seconds. A person answers and asks what she needs. She describes a leak. The person says, "Let me check if we can get someone out today, one moment," and puts her on hold for another 70 seconds to find the dispatcher. Total hold time: two minutes on a three-minute call.
She stayed, this time. The next caller, with a bigger leak and less patience, did not.
How Long Callers Actually Wait
Patience runs out fast, and it runs out on a curve:
| Time on hold | What happens |
|---|---|
| Under 30 seconds | Most callers wait it out |
| Past 1 minute | 60% have hung up |
| Past 5 minutes | More than 90% are gone |
Source: Mindful (Medallia), "How Long Should Customers Hold?"
That is the whole problem in one table. A minute feels short to the business and long to the person holding a wet towel under a leak.
What People Get Wrong About Hold Time
Owners only look at the front half. The queue wait gets measured, because the phone system reports it as ASA. The mid-call hold gets ignored, because it feels like part of helping the customer. But to the caller, hold is hold. A 20-second queue and a 90-second mid-call hold is a 110-second wait.
The other mistake is treating hold music as a fix. Music, messages, and "your call is important to us" make the wait more tolerable. They do not make it shorter. The caller still knows how long they have been waiting, and the abandonment rate still climbs with every second.
Hold Time vs. ASA vs. Wait Time
These get used interchangeably, and the differences matter:
| Term | What it measures | Counts mid-call holds? | Per call or averaged? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hold time | All waiting on a call, before and during | Yes | Either |
| Average speed of answer | The pre-answer wait on calls that were answered | No | Averaged |
| Wait time | The pre-answer wait | No | Usually per call |
When a vendor quotes you one number, ask which one it is.
Why It Matters
Hold time is where customers are lost in slow motion. Nobody hangs up at second one. They hang up at second 45, or second 90, after deciding you are too busy for them — 60% are gone once the wait passes a minute. For a small business, the fix is not a better queue or nicer music. It is removing the wait. An AI receptionist answers every call at once, with no queue, and it already knows the answers, so there is no "let me check." Hold time goes to zero, and the abandoned calls that came with it disappear. See the numbers on our missed call statistics page.
The Bottom Line
Hold time is the total seconds a caller spends waiting on the line, before the call is answered and during it. It is the main reason callers hang up: 60% quit after a minute, and more than 90% after five. Measure both halves, not just the queue, and aim for zero, because the only hold time a customer likes is none.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is an acceptable hold time?
- Shorter than most businesses manage. Callers start getting restless within about 30 seconds, and 60% are gone once the wait passes a minute. For a small service business, where the caller often has an urgent problem and a list of competitors, the honest target is zero. Nobody should be on hold, because there should always be something free to answer.
- What is the difference between hold time and average speed of answer?
- Average speed of answer, or ASA, is the average time callers waited before a person picked up, counting only calls that were answered. Hold time is broader. It includes that initial wait, plus any time the caller was put on hold during the conversation, and it can be looked at per call rather than as an average. ASA is a subset of hold time.
- How do you reduce hold time?
- Add answering capacity or remove the need for a person. More people answering means shorter queues. Better information at the front desk means fewer mid-call holds to "go check." An AI receptionist does both at once: it takes unlimited calls at the same time, and it already knows the prices and schedule, so it never puts anyone on hold to ask.
Article Sources
Cira uses primary sources — official data, filings, and standards bodies — to support the facts in our glossary.
- Mindful (Medallia). “How Long Should Customers Hold?.” Accessed 2026-09-16.
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