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Say your Local Services Ads (LSA) send you 100 calls a month, and your office misses 12 of them during business hours. Since October 1, 2026, Google can bill you for each of those 12 where the caller stayed on the line more than 20 seconds.
Nobody has to pick up for the charge to land. The miss is the lead.
Answered calls were always billable. Now the ones that ring out can be too. Google expanded its LSA help page this month (Search Engine Roundtable flagged it on October 8), and it answers more than the original advertiser email did.
Key Takeaways
- A missed call in business hours is a billable lead once the caller stays on past 20 seconds.
- One charge per customer until 15 days pass with no contact. Then a new lead starts.
- A phone menu starts the clock at the first key press. Hang-ups at the menu cost nothing.
- Business hours means your Google Business Profile hours. A narrower ad schedule bills a miss only inside both.
- Disputes run through an automated review. Credits usually land within 30 days, and the original charge stays on the invoice.
- Answering more calls can raise your bill. The payoff shows up in booked jobs.
What Google Bills for Local Services Ads Missed Calls
Google’s How leads work page covers these cases:
| What happens | Billed? |
|---|---|
| You miss a call in business hours, caller stays on past 20 seconds | Yes |
| Caller hangs up before 20 seconds | No |
| Call rolls to voicemail or a greeting, caller stays on past 20 seconds, no message | Yes |
| Caller leaves a voicemail | Yes (already a valid lead before Oct 1) |
| Menu plays, caller hangs up before pressing a key | No |
| Caller presses a key, then stays on past 20 seconds | Yes |
| Same customer contacts you again with no 15-day gap | No second charge |
After Google bills a lead, later calls and messages from the same number or email stay free while contact continues inside 15 days. After 15 days of silence, the next contact is a new lead. A short miss followed by a callback that becomes a conversation, whoever dials, is judged as an answered call and charged once. That is the charge you want.
Phone Trees, Voicemail and the Hours Field
A menu moves the clock. If your system asks callers to press a key, the 20 seconds start at the first key press, and a caller who hangs up at the menu costs nothing. A menu is also a toll booth on your own customers. I have no clean number on how many callers a menu loses.
A call that rolls to voicemail or an automated greeting during business hours counts as connected, and a caller who stays past 20 seconds is billable with or without a message. The caller who sat through your greeting and hung up without a word used to cost nothing. Now that call can bill.
Google defines business hours as the hours on your Google Business Profile. If your LSA ad schedule is narrower, a miss bills only inside both. A profile that says open 24 hours makes every hour a business hour, so only a narrower ad schedule would exclude any. That is my read of the wording. Google has not said it.
Calls outside business hours fall outside the billing rule. They still matter. On one home-improvement contractor’s AI intake and support line, 26% of the 6,432 calls it took over 79 days (June to August 2026) arrived outside 8 AM to 8 PM or on a weekend. One line at one company, but that’s a quarter of the phone.
The Math on Your Own Numbers
Swap in last month’s numbers from your account. Every figure below is a “say.”
Say 100 LSA calls a month at $53 a lead. That $53 is the all-trades LSA average from a February 2026 benchmark of 888 contractors by SearchLight Digital, as reported by PipelineOn.
- Say 80 calls arrive in business hours and your office misses 15%: 12 go unanswered.
- Say 3 of the 12 leave a voicemail. Those were billable before October 1.
- Say 5 of the other 9 stay on past 20 seconds and hang up. Those 5 are the new charges: 5 × $53 = $265 a month, about $3,180 a year.
The invoice is the small number. Say you would have booked 3 of those 12 callers at a $1,500 ticket. That is $4,500 a month in jobs against $265 in new charges.
Answering them will not shrink the bill. Now you pay for 8 of the 12 ($424). Answer all 12 and, if every call counts as a valid lead, you pay for 12 ($636). PPC Land took a public calculator’s default example (40 calls a month, $40 a lead), assumed every answered call bills, and found total Google spend rose $128 a month when the answer rate went from 70% to 95%.
The honest counterpoint: say you get 30 LSA calls a month, 24 in business hours, and answer 95% of those. That is 1.2 misses a month, 14.4 charges a year if every one bills, roughly $760 at $53. Skip the overhaul and read the bill. The shops that should worry have a full board at lunch, a Monday pile-up, or one dispatcher covering the phone and the radio.
→ Curious how many calls your office misses in business hours? Run the free Phone Revenue Leak Analyzer. It takes 60 seconds.
How to Dispute LSA Leads
Google’s help menu has an item called “How to dispute charges.” It opens the page on automated lead credits. Google judges a lead when the customer first makes contact, reassesses charged leads over time, and in most cases applies a credit within 30 days. The original charge stays on your invoice. Each lead shows Charged, Not charged, In review or Credited.
The one dispute-shaped tool is the Rate this lead survey, which Google says may occasionally earn a bonus credit.
The manual dispute option went away in July 2024. ALM Corp reported one $400 charge for an existing customer in March 2026: Google confirmed the facts in writing and still refused the credit. ALM details only this case but describes a wider pattern.
Google’s credits page describes no form to file, so the defense is a record. Once a month, match the Charge Status column against your call log and flag duplicates, spam and existing customers.
Five Things Google Still Has Not Said
The update settled two early questions, voicemail and which hours count. Five gaps remain.
1. Where the 20 seconds start on a plain ring-through line
The page covers menus and voicemail. Its FAQ calls the missed-call test a 20-second ring rule, which hints that ring time counts. Google never says so outright.
2. Hold queues and ring groups
Google treats an automated greeting as a connected call. I’d put it at 80% that a caller waiting in your queue counts too. Plan as if it does.
3. The spam safeguards
Google announced protections against robocalls and spam and published no mechanism. Whether a run of 21-second nuisance calls is filtered before billing, or credited inside 30 days, is unknown.
4. Human, answering service or AI
The page says you answer and speak with the customer and draws no line between a person and an AI agent. PPC Land’s coverage is silent on it too. Plan as if an AI-answered call bills like any answered call.
5. The price of a missed-call lead
Lead prices vary by location, job type, lead type and bidding mode, and Google lists no missed-call price. The $53 in my example is the average price of an ordinary LSA lead, applied here on assumption.
What to Do This Week
- Audit the hours. Compare your Google Business Profile hours with your LSA ad schedule and set each on purpose.
- Check coverage in your two busiest hours. Count calls that rang past 20 seconds unanswered in your phone system’s report. If lunch, Monday morning or a full board leaves nobody free, fix it with staffing, a bigger ring group or overflow answering. Our agent Flo takes the call after a ring count you set or when every line is busy, qualifies it, books it or routes an emergency, and logs it to your CRM. The revenue side is in our missed-call cost breakdown.
- Decide on the menu. Test one line for two weeks and score booked jobs alongside the invoice.
- Read the next three statements. I ran WebMechanix, a performance marketing agency, for about 15 years, and we managed about $1B in ad spend. The first few invoices under any new pay-per-lead rule are where the surprises live. Check each line against your call log.
The Final Word
Local services ads missed calls now carry a price, and Google has said enough to plan around it. The 20 seconds, the 15 days and the menu rule are written down. This week, work the three things you control: the hours Google sees, coverage in your two busiest hours, and the first three statements.
→ Want to hear an AI agent pick up where your voicemail would? Call Jill, our voice AI agent. She’ll walk you through how Mecha handles the calls your office can’t reach.
