Cold calling still produces meetings, but at low rates. The largest UK-run dataset I found with published counts is 204,698 dials made by the appointment-setting agency WHAM, reported by Cognism in March 2025. In it, about one dial in five connected and 2.3% of conversations became a meeting. That works out at roughly one meeting per 332 dials. In a 2018 RAIN Group survey, 54% of B2B buyers said the seller behind their latest accepted meeting had reached them by phone. The channel itself is shrinking: Ofcom reports that UK call minutes fell 7% in 2025, and 91% of them now start on a mobile. These are the most recent figures I could find in October 2026.
The short answer
Does cold calling still work in 2026? On the published figures, yes, but at a low hit rate, and a second or third attempt adds a lot. The most recent dataset with counts (WHAM, via Cognism, 2025) shows a conversation-to-meeting rate of 2.3%, down from 4.82% in the same agency's data a year earlier. Two thirds of conversations came on the first attempt, and 93% came by the third.
Every figure on this page is what one dataset found, from one set of callers, lists and markets. None of them is a target. Your own numbers after a month of calling are a better guide, and how to cold call in the UK sets out how to measure them.
Connect, conversation and meeting rates
Cognism's report "The State of Cold Calling in 2025" carries no date; Cognism's statistics blog post on it was published on 19 March 2025. Its data comes from WHAM ("We Have A Meeting"), a UK appointment-setting agency that calls from the UK into the UK and mainland Europe. The report gives no UK-only split and no data period, so the figures most likely cover calendar 2024.
The WHAM dataset contains 204,698 dials, 41,936 connected calls, 27,513 conversations and 617 meetings booked. The rates below are my arithmetic from those counts.
| Stage | Count | Rate |
|---|---|---|
| Dials | 204,698 | |
| Connected calls | 41,936 | 20.5% of dials |
| Conversations | 27,513 | 65.6% of connected calls |
| Meetings booked | 617 | 2.24% of conversations (Cognism rounds to 2.3%) |
| Dial to meeting | 0.30%, about 1 meeting per 332 dials |
Cognism's headline "success rate" of 2.3% means conversations that led to a meeting. It is not a dial-to-meeting rate, although some secondary sites quote it as one. The dial-to-meeting rate in the same data is 0.30%.
The rate fell sharply year on year. Cognism's 2024 report gave WHAM's success rate as 4.82%, on the same definition. The 2025 report gives four reasons. WHAM made more calls into mainland Europe, where language and cultural barriers apply. The dataset was much bigger. There is more competition on the phone, and cold calling is getting harder with traditional methods. The 2024 sample size is not restated in the 2025 report.
An older figure comes from Gong. Gong's 2018 analysis of 90,380 connected cold calls, with unanswered and IVR calls filtered out, put the share ending in a held follow-up meeting at about 1.5%. Gong published it on 29 March 2018 and did not state the region or the period.
How many attempts it takes
The WHAM data counts conversations by the attempt on which they happened. The table is from the 2025 Cognism report.
| Attempt | Conversations |
|---|---|
| 1 | 18,541 |
| 2 | 5,079 |
| 3 | 2,023 |
| 4 | 995 |
| 5 | 450 |
| 6 | 185 |
| 7 | 101 |
| 8 | 55 |
| 9 | 34 |
| 10 | 18 |
The rows add up to 27,481, which is 32 fewer than the report's headline of 27,513 conversations. On the table's own total, 67.5% of conversations happened on the first attempt. By the third attempt the figure was 93.3%, and by the fifth it was 98.6%. Cognism's report calls three attempts the optimum on this data.
Callbacks matter too. Of WHAM's 617 meetings, 164 were booked from a callback, which is 26.6% of all meetings (Cognism 2025 report).
Call length and timing
In the WHAM data the average cold call lasted about 93 seconds in the 2025 report, up from about 83 seconds the year before. Gong's 2018 study found that successful cold calls were almost twice as long as unsuccessful ones.
On timing, the 2025 Cognism report found that Tuesday had the most meetings booked in the WHAM data. Friday was one of the worst days for booking meetings but one of the best for having conversations. The report names 10am to 11am as the best hour, with 2pm to 3pm next, based on average call length by hour rather than on meetings. The report itself says WHAM's best day and time may not be yours. The legal side of when you can call is a separate question, covered in cold calling hours in the UK.
What buyers say
RAIN Group's "Top Performance in Sales Prospecting" study surveyed 488 buyers and 489 sellers across 25 industries. Its results were published on 31 January 2018, and the survey does not state which countries the respondents were in.
- 82% of buyers said they accept meetings with sellers who reach out to them.
- 54% of buyers said the seller behind their most recent accepted meeting had connected by phone, against 58% by email.
- 49% of buyers said the phone was their preferred way to be contacted, and 70% said it was the method actually used.
- For email, 80% said it was preferred and 78% said it was actually used.
These are buyers reporting their own behaviour, eight years ago. They show the phone working alongside email rather than replacing it.
Is the phone channel shrinking?
UK call volumes are falling, and the calls that remain are mostly mobile. These figures cover all calls, not sales calls.
- Total fixed and mobile call volumes fell by 12 billion minutes (7%) to 164 billion minutes in 2025, according to Ofcom's Communications Market Report 2026, published on 30 June 2026.
- In the same report, 91% of call minutes in 2025 started on mobile networks, up from 90% in 2024.
- Outgoing calls from fixed lines fell by 19% to 15 billion minutes in 2025, while mobile call minutes fell by 6% to 149 billion (Ofcom, 2026).
- There were 21.4 million UK fixed voice connections at the end of 2025, down 2.8 million (12%) in a year (Ofcom, 2026).
- There were 123 million UK mobile subscriptions at the end of 2025, a total that includes machine-to-machine connections (Ofcom, 2026).
- Average outgoing call minutes per mobile subscription fell by 6% to 146 minutes a month in 2025 (Ofcom, 2026).
The trend continued into 2026. Ofcom's Telecommunications Market Data Update for Q1 2026, published on 23 July 2026, shows that in the first quarter of 2026, fixed-originated call minutes were down 14.9% year on year to 3.32 billion. Mobile-originated call minutes fell 4.6% to 36.34 billion in the same quarter. Business fixed-line call minutes fell from 6,620 million in 2024 to 5,981 million in 2025, a drop of 9.7% on my arithmetic from the same update.
Ofcom research found that in February 2025, 42% of phone users had received a suspicious call in the previous three months, as Ofcom presented at the NICC Open Forum on 12 November 2025. Those are scam calls, not sales calls, but I think they shape how a call from an unknown number is received.
With most minutes on mobiles, it is worth knowing that the TPS covers mobile numbers as well as landlines. The detail is in does the TPS cover mobile numbers.
The UK registers in numbers
The TPS register holds around 13.5 million UK phone numbers and the CTPS register around 1.1 million, from the live files in October 2026. The register files carry no split between mobiles and landlines. Dated snapshots and how numbers join and leave are in the TPS register in numbers.
Complaints and enforcement
The Information Commissioner's Annual Report for 2024/25 (HC 956, covering 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025) gives the number of PECR concerns reported each year.
| Concern reported | 2022/23 | 2023/24 | 2024/25 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Telesales calls and texts | 50,954 | 53,476 | 49,494 |
| Telesales calls where I spoke to a person | 29,131 | 33,056 | 29,308 |
| Telesales calls where I heard a recorded voice | 12,888 | 13,015 | 13,295 |
| Spam texts | 8,935 | 7,405 | 6,891 |
| Emails | 20,331 | 31,635 | 29,883 |
| Cookies | 1,753 | 2,669 | 4,515 |
The three middle rows break down the first. Sales calls with a live person on the line made up 29,308 of the 49,494 telesales concerns in 2024/25, the largest of the three. Emails, at 29,883, were slightly higher that year.
In 2024/25 the ICO issued nine monetary penalty notices totalling £890,000 and nine enforcement notices under PECR, according to the investigations section of the same report. In 2023/24 it issued 26 monetary penalty notices totalling £2,590,000 and 25 enforcement notices. It also executed 11 search warrants across three PECR investigations in 2024/25. The regulator has been the Information Commission since 30 September 2026. These are the most recent Information Commissioner figures I could read. The cases behind them are in ICO PECR fines and cases.
Why every dial counts under PECR
In the WHAM data about four dials in five never connected. Under PECR those dials still count. Since 5 February 2026, the definition of "call" in regulation 2(1) of PECR says that "a reference to making a call includes a reference to attempting to establish such a connection". An unanswered attempt to a number on the register is therefore within the rule.
The rule itself is in regulation 21: no unsolicited direct marketing calls to a number listed on the register kept under regulation 26. A caller is not in breach where the number has been on the register for less than 28 days, or where the subscriber has told that caller they do not, for the time being, object to its calls. So screening has to cover every number you dial, not only the ones that answer.
For conduct from 5 February 2026 the maximum penalty is £17.5 million, or 4% of total annual worldwide turnover for an undertaking if that is higher. The changes are set out in the Data (Use and Access) Act and cold calling. You can check a single number for free with our TPS check.
How to read cold calling statistics
Check the definition first. "Success rate" means conversation to meeting in the Cognism report and connected call to held meeting in Gong's study, and other vendors use other definitions. Two figures with the same name can measure different things.
Check whose calls they are. Vendor data comes from the vendor's own customers or partners, on their lists and in their markets. WHAM's calls include mainland Europe, and Gong's come from calls recorded on its own platform.
Check the date. The Gong and RAIN Group figures are from 2018, even where the page around them carries a recent date.
Check what sits in the dial count. Dead numbers are dialled but can never connect, so they pull down the dial-to-connect rate without saying anything about the calling. An HLR lookup finds dead mobile numbers before you dial; HLR lookups explained covers how it works, and dead number checks are priced on our pricing page.
Then set your own baseline. A month of your own dials, connects, conversations and meetings tells you more than any published average. The method is in how to cold call in the UK, and opening lines are in cold calling scripts and rules of thumb.
Sources
- Cognism, The State of Cold Calling in 2025, undated; Cognism's statistics blog post on it was published 19 March 2025. WHAM data: 204,698 dials, 41,936 connected calls, 27,513 conversations, 617 meetings; UK and mainland Europe; period not stated.
- Gong, Is cold calling dead?, 29 March 2018. 90,380 connected outbound cold calls; region and period not stated.
- RAIN Group, Top Performance in Sales Prospecting, 31 January 2018. Survey of 488 buyers and 489 sellers across 25 industries; countries not stated.
- Ofcom, Communications Market Report 2026, 30 June 2026. Covers calendar 2025.
- Ofcom, Telecommunications Market Data Update Q1 2026, 23 July 2026.
- Ofcom, Combating Scam Calls: An Ofcom Perspective, NICC Open Forum, 12 November 2025. Cites Ofcom research from February 2025.
- Information Commissioner, Annual Report and Financial Statements 2024/25, HC 956, July 2025. Covers 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025.
- TPS and CTPS register files, our daily load, 15 October 2026.
- The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, regulations 2 and 21, as amended by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, read on legislation.gov.uk in October 2026.