--- title: "LSA Missed Call Charges: What Roofers Pay Now" url: https://tailwindsops.com/insights/lsa-missed-call-charges-roofing description: "Since Oct 1, Google bills unanswered LSA calls held past 20 seconds. How roofers size the cost, cut the exposure, and work the callers they missed." lang: en --- Roofing # Google Now Charges Roofers for Missed LSA Calls: The Math and the Fix Since October 1, 2026, Google bills unanswered business-hours Local Services Ads calls held past 20 seconds. What changed, what it costs a roofer, and how to cut it. Sonny Round, Co-Founder — Tailwinds Ops October 6, 2026 ## Key Takeaways - Since October 1, 2026, Google bills an unanswered business-hours LSA call as a lead if the caller stays on the line more than 20 seconds (Google notice to advertisers). - If your phone menu requires a key press, the 20-second clock starts only after the caller presses it. No press, no charge under the new rule. - Follow-up calls to the same person within 15 days of the first interaction are charged once, according to Google's Ads Liaison. - Home services businesses answer 52% of inbound calls with a person, rising to 65% for calls over 15 seconds (Invoca, 2026). - Roofing and gutters has the highest median search cost per lead in home services at $228.15 (LocaliQ, April 2024 to March 2025). A homeowner with a leak sees your Local Services ad, taps call, and lets it ring while your crew lead is on a roof two towns over. Until last week, that missed call cost you nothing unless you reached the homeowner later. Since October 1 it can land on your bill with no conversation attached. ## Does Google charge for missed calls on Local Services Ads? Yes, since October 1, 2026. Google's email to advertisers says missed calls during business hours "will now be charged as valid leads if a user stays on the line for more than 20 seconds." Calls outside your listed hours fall outside that rule, and callers routed through a press-a-key menu start the clock only after they press. > **Missed-call charging** is the Local Services Ads rule, effective October 1, 2026, that bills an unanswered business-hours call as a valid lead once the caller has stayed on the line for more than 20 seconds. Search Engine Roundtable published the full text of Google's notice (https://www.seroundtable.com/google-lsa-missed-subsequent-calls-41940.html). As of October 6, Google's public How leads work help page (https://support.google.com/localservices/answer/7195435?hl=en) still shows the old valid-lead list, so the email is the written source for now. The notice has a second part. If a first call doesn't qualify as a charged lead, later calls between you and that person that meet Google's valid-lead criteria get charged. Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Liaison, clarified on X that follow-up calls to the same person within 15 days of the first interaction are charged once. After 15 days, a new call can start a new lead. ## Which LSA calls were already billable before October 1? More than most owners assume. Google's help page already counted an answered call, a voicemail, and a missed call you returned where you either spoke with the customer or left a voicemail. The new charge covers a narrower group: the caller nobody answered, who left no message, and who never connected on a callback. | Call outcome | Before October 1 | From October 1 | | --- | --- | --- | | Answered, you spoke with the caller | Charged | Charged | | Missed, caller left a voicemail | Charged | Charged | | Missed, no voicemail, you called back and connected | Charged | Charged | | Missed in business hours, held over 20 seconds, never reached | Not charged | Charged | | Missed, caller hung up within 20 seconds | Only if you called back and connected | Only if you called back and connected | | Phone menu, caller never pressed a key | Only if you called back and connected | Not charged under the missed-call rule | | Missed outside business hours, no voicemail | Only if you called back and connected | Same; the new rule covers business hours only | That distinction matters when you size the cost. As PPC Land pointed out (https://ppc.land/google-lsa-advertisers-face-missed-call-charges-from-october-1/), several calculators that appeared after the announcement count every missed caller, including the ones who leave voicemail and were billable all along. The new cost is the silent missed call. ## How much could missed LSA calls cost a roofing company? It comes down to four numbers from your own account: business-hours LSA calls, the share nobody answers, the share of those callers who hold past 20 seconds and leave no message, and your lead price. Multiply them. Google doesn't publish LSA lead prices; its help page says they vary by location, job type, lead type and bidding mode. Here is a worked example. The inputs are round-number assumptions picked to keep the math easy; swap in your own. Forty business-hours LSA calls a month at a 70% answer rate leaves 12 missed. If half of those callers held past 20 seconds and left no message, that is 6 new charges. At a $100 lead, you pay $600 a month for conversations that never happened. The answer rate is the input owners most often guess high. Invoca's 2026 home services report, built from calls on its own platform, found that 52% of callers to home services businesses speak with a person (https://www.invoca.com/reports/the-invoca-home-services-lead-conversion-benchmarks-report-2026). For calls over 15 seconds the rate is 65%, and over 30 seconds it is 73%. Roofing isn't one of the nine sub-industries Invoca breaks out, so read it as a home services average. Use 52% in the example above and the missed count rises from 12 to about 19. For a sense of what a roofing contact costs elsewhere, LocaliQ's benchmark of 3,211 home services search campaigns put roofing and gutters at a median $228.15 per lead (https://localiq.com/blog/home-services-search-advertising-benchmarks/), the highest of any home services category it measured, from April 2024 through March 2025. Those figures come from search ads rather than LSA. They still show why a paid roofing call left ringing is expensive in any channel. Our full breakdown is in what roofing leads cost per booked job (https://tailwindsops.com/insights/roofing-lead-cost). ## How do you stop paying for LSA calls nobody answers? Answer more calls during the hours Google thinks you are open, and make those hours honest. Then call back every missed caller fast, because a charged lead you never reach is the worst outcome on the table. Most of the steps below take an afternoon to set up, and none of them require new software. - **Match listed hours to staffed hours.** After the move into Google Ads, business hours sync one way from your Google Business Profile (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/17213585?hl=en), so the profile is where you fix them. If nobody answers the LSA line on Saturday, don't list Saturday hours. - **Route the LSA number to a line that rolls over.** A ring group that hits the office, then the owner's cell, then whoever is dispatching catches calls a single desk phone drops. - **Weigh a press-1 menu.** Google starts the 20-second clock only after the caller presses a key and charges nothing if they never do. The trade-off is real: some homeowners hang up at a menu, and those jobs are gone whether you were charged or not. - **Call back within minutes.** You may have already paid for the lead, so the callback is how you get something for the money. The response-time research is in our speed-to-lead statistics (https://tailwindsops.com/insights/speed-to-lead-statistics). - **Review charged leads every month.** Google reassesses charged leads, may credit low-quality ones automatically, and lets you flag a bad lead through its feedback survey. - **Save your LSA reports before migration.** Google says historical performance reports won't carry over to Google Ads. You want a pre-October cost-per-lead baseline to compare against. ## What should roofers do with last month's missed callers? Treat them as a list you have already paid for. Each one is a homeowner who searched for a roofer, picked your ad, and dialed. Export them, find the ones who never got a callback, and work them the way you would work an unsold estimate: a short text from a real person, then a call. In Google Ads, the Leads page replaces the LSA inbox and lets you download your leads to import into your own CRM (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/17213585?hl=en). Pull every call lead from the last 60 days, match it against jobs booked, and you will have a short list of people who called and never heard back. Some already hired another roofer. Others may still be sorting out an insurance claim and would take your call. The same approach works across the rest of your CRM. Our roofing database reactivation playbook (https://tailwindsops.com/insights/roofing-database-reactivation-playbook) covers older leads, and how to reactivate unsold roofing estimates (https://tailwindsops.com/insights/reactivate-unsold-roofing-estimates) covers quotes that stalled after the inspection. We've found reactivation campaigns produce response rates in the 2 to 5 percent range, so count booked inspections rather than replies. A homeowner who called you about a roof gave you their number for a reason, but texting rules still apply once you move into follow-up marketing. Confirm consent before any campaign and keep a working opt-out in every message. The detail is in the TCPA rules for texting old leads (https://tailwindsops.com/insights/texting-old-leads-tcpa-rules). This is general information, not legal advice. ## Is LSA still worth it for roofers after the change? For most roofers who can staff the phone, yes. The rule mostly costs you on calls left ringing, and answered calls are billed the same way as before. If your office misses a large share of business-hours calls and can't fix that soon, tighten your listed hours or your budget until it can, because every silent missed call now has a price. Two more changes land this fall. Google is moving LSA into Google Ads as a Performance Max campaign type with pay-per-lead goals (https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/17213585?hl=en), with roofing in the first phase that began in August 2026, and manual bidding, including a maximum cost per lead, goes away in the move. An account migrated this season loses its old reports and its manual price cap while the definition of a billable call widens. Track cost per booked inspection from October on. Cost per lead before and after October 1 measures two different things, so a month-over-month comparison across that date will mislead you. Start with one report this week: every LSA call from the last 30 days, marked answered, missed and called back, or missed and never reached. The last group tells you what the new rule costs you and who to call today. If you want the rest of your CRM sized the same way, our lead reactivation service (https://tailwindsops.com/services/lead-reactivation) starts with that count. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Does Google charge for missed calls on Local Services Ads? Yes, since October 1, 2026, for calls during your listed business hours where the caller stays on the line more than 20 seconds. Callers who hang up sooner, and callers who never press a key on a routing menu, are not charged under that rule. ### Does calling back a missed LSA caller create a second charge? Google's Ads Liaison said follow-up calls to the same person within 15 days of the first interaction are charged once. Google hasn't said in writing how a charged missed call and your callback are counted together, so check your leads list after a few weeks of the new rule. ### Are missed LSA calls outside business hours charged? The new missed-call rule covers business hours only. A call outside your hours can still become a valid lead if the caller leaves a voicemail or you call back and connect, so keep your listed hours accurate. ### Can I get a credit for a bad LSA lead? Google reassesses charged leads and may credit low-quality ones automatically in the United States and Canada. You can also report a poor lead through the feedback survey on that lead, and Google says it may credit some of those. ### How do I find missed LSA callers to follow up with? Download your call leads from the Leads page in Google Ads, or the LSA inbox if your account hasn't migrated, and compare them with your booked jobs. Anyone who called and never got a conversation is the first list to work. ## Keep reading Roofing How to Reactivate Unsold Roofing Estimates The unsold proposal pile is the highest-intent dormant segment in a roofing CRM. How to segment it by age and objection, sequence it, and work it legally.: https://tailwindsops.com/insights/reactivate-unsold-roofing-estimates Roofing Roofing Lead Cost: What You Actually Pay Per Booked Job What a roofing lead costs, what a booked roof costs, and why the gap between those two numbers is bigger than most owners think.: https://tailwindsops.com/insights/roofing-lead-cost Database Reactivation Managed Lead Reactivation Services vs. Software vs. DIY Three ways to work a dead lead list: hire a managed service, buy software, or run it in-house. What each costs in owner hours, fees and compliance risk.: https://tailwindsops.com/insights/managed-lead-reactivation-services ## Structured data ```json [ { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Article", "headline": "Google Now Charges Roofers for Missed LSA Calls: The Math and the Fix", "description": "Since Oct 1, Google bills unanswered LSA calls held past 20 seconds. 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