Australian Small Business Call Data 2026

Key findings

• More than 1 in 4 calls (26.5%, 557 of 2,098) came outside 9am to 5pm on weekdays, including weekends and public holidays.
• After-hours callers were more likely to be new business: 53.6% of after-hours conversations were bookings, quotes or new enquiries, compared with 42.4% during business hours.
• 44.1% of conversations were potential new work: a booking, a quote or a new enquiry.
• Only 1.1% of conversations were spam, sales calls or robocalls.
• Monday was the busiest day, with 23.5% of the week's calls, and 9am was the busiest hour (12.0% of calls).
• Only 2.7% of callers asked if they were talking to a robot or AI, or asked for a real person.

After hours here means before 8am or from 6pm on weekdays, plus weekends and public holidays. The 9-to-5 figure uses 9am to 5pm. Conversation figures use the 1,263 calls where the caller spoke.

Calls by hour of day

Hour is the business's own local time, all days.

Total: 2,098 calls

Calls peak at 9am and stay steady until about 4pm, then drop away. More than 1 in 4 still arrive outside 9 to 5.

Calls by day of week

Share of all 2,098 calls.

Total: 2,098 calls

Monday takes almost a quarter of the week's calls. Weekends account for 7.4%.

Small business only

Excluding the one charity client leaves 1,773 calls to 27 small businesses. In that cut, 24.5% of calls came outside 9 to 5, 57.8% of after-hours conversations were new business (vs 46.0% in hours), 47.7% of conversations were potential new work, Monday 24.1%, 9am 12.5%, and 3.1% asked if they were talking to a robot or a real person.

Methodology

Sources

AutoReception call records from Twilio (phone system) and ElevenLabs (AI voice platform).

Sample

2,098 inbound calls answered by the AI receptionist for 28 Australian clients (27 businesses and one charity), 4 February to 20 October 2026. There were no client calls in January. 1,263 of these calls included the caller speaking; the share figures for call reasons and the robot question use those 1,263 conversations. The small business cut excludes the charity (1,773 calls, 1,100 conversations).

Excluded

Demo, sales, internal and test lines, outbound campaigns, web and widget chats, and test calls from our own numbers.

Time zones

Times use each business's local state time zone and 2026 state public holidays.

Call reasons

Call reasons were classified from AI-generated call summaries using keywords. A spot check suggests about 4 in 5 are labelled correctly, so treat them as approximate. Spam is likely undercounted.

Robot question

The robot figure counts direct phrases such as "are you a robot" or "can I speak to a human", so the real figure is likely a little higher.

Caveats

Some businesses only forward missed, busy or after-hours calls to the AI, so these figures describe AI-answered calls, not every call a business receives. One business accounts for over a quarter of the calls (570 of 2,098), and most calls (1,213) went to automotive businesses. Call volume grew mainly because new businesses joined, not because individual businesses got busier.

Privacy

The data is anonymised and aggregated. No business names, caller numbers or call recordings are published.

How to cite this data

You're welcome to use these findings with a link to this page.

AutoReception (2026). Australian Small Business Call Data 2026: analysis of 2,098 real customer calls to Australian businesses, February to October 2026. https://autoreception.com.au/research/small-business-call-data-2026

Media enquiries: admin@autoreception.com.au

What this means for small businesses

If more than 1 in 4 calls come outside 9 to 5, and after-hours callers are more likely to be new customers, an unanswered phone is lost work. Learn what an AI receptionist does, how an Australian virtual receptionist handles local numbers and time zones, or set up after-hours call answering.

FAQ