On October 1, Google starts charging you for the calls you don't answer.
Not clicks. Not after-hours voicemail. Calls that come in during your listed business hours, that nobody picks up, where the caller waits more than 20 seconds. Google bills those as leads. You pay for the lead and you don't have the job.
Two mechanics, one date
Google sent a mandatory service announcement to Local Services advertisers headed "Upcoming changes to lead charge policy." It reached inboxes by August 24, 2026 and takes effect October 1, 2026.
Missed calls become chargeable
A call you don't answer during your listed business hours is billed as a valid lead if the caller stays on the line longer than 20 seconds. You pay for the lead and you don't have the job.
Follow-up calls can be charged again
Calling someone back is no longer automatically free. Google treats a call or message in the previous 15 days as a recent interaction and charges only once for follow-ups inside that window — but a follow-up after 15 days counts as a new lead and is charged again if it meets the valid-lead criteria. That mechanic comes from Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin, not from the notice itself.
Phone trees start the clock late
Where your setup makes callers press a key to get routed, the 20-second timer starts on the key press — and there's no charge at all if they never press one.
Read the notice yourself
- PPC Land — Google charges Local Services advertisers for missed calls over 20 secondsThe most detailed coverage. Full text of the advertiser email, and a careful account of what the notice leaves undefined.
- Search Engine Land — Google Local Services Ads will charge for some missed calls starting Oct. 1August 25, 2026. Makes the blunt point that you can be charged for a call nobody at the business ever answered.
- Search Engine Roundtable — Google to charge for missed and subsequent calls on LSAsAugust 25, 2026. The only outlet carrying an on-record Google statement: Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin's August 26 clarification of the 15-day follow-up window.
- Search Engine Watch — Google changes call lead charging policy for Local Services AdsAugust 25, 2026, with the notice reproduced in full.
- Google Ads Help — Local Services Ads transition to Performance Max with pay-per-lead goalsPrimary source, and the one piece of this Google has documented publicly. Confirms the migration timeline, the end of manual max-CPL bidding, and that performance history does not carry over.
What the change costs you per month
Pick your category to load published cost-per-lead benchmarks, then change any number that doesn't match your account. Every assumption is editable and shown.
Your account
Benchmarks load from your category. Change anything that doesn't match.
SearchLight, June 2026: median $71, 10th-90th percentile $43-$95. Book rate and average ticket from the 230-account February cut. 99 Calls put Q2 at $66.11.
Count last month's call log rather than estimating. Most owners guess low.
Plumbing runs $43–$95 between the 10th and 90th percentile, median $71. Your account beats all of it.
Google publishes no figure for this, so it stays an assumption you can see and change. 70% is our starting estimate.
At risk, not certainly lost — some callers do ring back.
An estimate, not a quote. The Google charge line is the part that is new on October 1, 2026 — the job value was always at stake.
Where these benchmarks come from
- SearchLight Digital — Home Services LSA Benchmark, February 2026First-party data888 contractor accounts, $6.72M tracked spend, 126,650 leads. Blended $53. Source of the book rates and average tickets used below.
- The Data-Driven Trades — Google LSA Benchmarks, June 2026First-party dataSearchLight's ongoing monthly series. 945 accounts, $13.1M spend. Blended $62.56, median $61.64. Publishes percentile bands, which is where the ranges below come from.
- 99 Calls — LSA Lead Cost by Industry, Q2 2026First-party data4,459 leads, $258,867 spend, April–June 2026. Smaller sample, independent of SearchLight, and lands in the same place: HVAC ~$50, plumbing ~$66.
- Google — How leads work in Local Services AdsConfirms the charging mechanics only. Google publishes no cost-per-lead benchmarks of any kind, so anyone citing Google for a CPL figure is inventing it.
We only use sources that publish observed spend from accounts they actually run, with the sample size stated. That rules out most of what turns up when you search for these numbers — a lot of it is aggregators citing each other, and some of it credits data to companies that have never published a cost-per-lead figure. The ranges here are wide because the real ones are. Your own account data beats all of it.
A phone tree stops the charge by losing the customer.
Google's own notice says the 20-second timer only starts once a caller presses a key to get routed, and that no charge applies if they never press one. Read quickly, that sounds like a fix: put a menu in front of the line and the billing problem goes away.
It does. Because the caller hangs up. A homeowner with a burst pipe who reaches a menu at 9:40am does not press 3 for scheduling — they hang up and call the next shop, and Google charges you nothing because nothing happened. You have avoided the lead fee by giving away the job.
That trade is worse than the charge. The charge is a lead fee. The job is the lead fee plus the ticket plus whatever that customer was worth for the next ten years.
Answering is the only response that avoids the fee and keeps the job. That's the entire argument for this product, and Google just put a price on the alternative.
Four things worth doing, only one of which we sell
Audit your listed hours
The charge only applies during the business hours on your profile. If your hours say you're open until 6pm but the office empties at 4:30, you've told Google to bill you for ninety minutes a day. Tighten the hours to when someone genuinely answers.
Find out what your miss rate actually is
Most owners have never had a billing reason to measure this, so the number is usually a guess and usually low. Pull the call log for last month and count. The answer is the input every other decision depends on.
Fix overflow before after-hours
This policy charges business-hours misses. The call that costs you is the one that arrives while the office is already on the phone — not the 2am call. Whatever you do about overflow matters more than whatever you do about nights.
Put something on the line that always answers
This is the part we sell, so weigh it accordingly. An agent that picks up in under five seconds takes the name, the address, and the problem, then books it or hands it to whoever's on call. It answers the overflow call and the 2am call the same way.
The notice leaves real questions open
We'd rather you hear this from us than find it out in October. The announcement is thinner than the summary coverage suggests.
- Google says it is adding safeguards against robocalls and spam abuse, but the notice describes no mechanism, threshold, or appeal route.
- The notice gives no dispute process for a missed-call charge you believe is invalid, and no indication of whether missed calls are priced at parity with answered ones.
- There is no Google support page, blog post, or public announcement about this change at all. The only primary record is the advertiser email that reached inboxes on August 24, 2026, which is why every link below is trade press rather than Google.
- Google's own help page on how Local Services leads work still describes the old rule — that a missed call is billable only if you follow it up yourself. It had not been updated when we last checked, so checking Google's documentation alone would tell you this change doesn't exist.
- Separately, Google is migrating Local Services Ads into Google Ads as Performance Max with pay-per-lead goals. That part Google has documented: manual bidding including the maximum cost-per-lead cap is no longer supported, and campaign performance history does not carry over. Phase one began in August 2026 for select US advertisers, plumbing among the named trades, with the rest following through late 2026 and 2027.
- Google has never connected those two changes. The argument that losing your cost-per-lead baseline while the billable set widens is worse than either on its own is PPC Land's reading, and ours — not something Google has said.
Find out what your line actually does. Free, takes ten minutes.
We call your business line twice after hours — once on a weeknight, once on a Saturday morning — and send you a written count of what happened: how long it rang, and what picked up. No recordings kept. No pitch attached to the results.
If your line handles both, we'll tell you that and you can ignore us until October.