Before a customer ever messages you on Yelp, they can see two numbers on your page: your response time (“Responds in about 10 minutes”) and your response rate. Those numbers are doing sales work for you — or against you — on every single visit.

Yelp’s help pages explain how the numbers are calculated; the question owners still ask is: is my response time good? Let’s do both.

How Yelp actually calculates it

Straight from Yelp’s documentation:

Response time is the median time to answer new messages over the last 30 days. Median, not average — one slow reply won’t wreck a fast month, and one fast reply won’t fix a slow one.
The after-hours window (6pm–8am) is excluded. A message that lands at 9pm and gets answered at 8:30am counts as a 30-minute response, not 11.5 hours.
Response rate counts whether you reply to new messages at all — every ignored message in the 30-day window drags it down. Handled it by phone? Mark it replied in the app.
Ignore messages long enough and it gets worse: if you don’t reply within 7 days and haven’t replied to anything in 30 days, Yelp automatically disables your Request a Quote button. Your lead source switches itself off.

So what’s a good response time in 2026?

Yelp publishes no official tiers — the badge simply mirrors your median. Based on Yelp’s own published data and how the badge displays, honest benchmarks look like this:

Your 30-day median	What it means
Under 10 minutes	Top tier. The badge itself becomes a selling point.
Under 1 hour	Competitive. Yelp’s data says customers are 2x more likely to respond to replies within an hour that address project details.
Under 1 day	The bare minimum. Sub-1-day responders see 4x more quote requests than slower businesses.
Over 1 day	Most jobs are decided before your reply lands.

Aim for the first row, settle for nothing below the second. A 100% response rate is the easier half — even “Sorry, we don’t service that area” counts as a reply and protects your numbers.

Why speed compounds: ranking and the 4x flywheel

Responsiveness doesn’t just convert the lead in front of you. Yelp’s default “Recommended” sort draws on engagement and transaction data, including quote requests. Fast responders see more requests (the 4x figure above), which generates more engagement, which feeds visibility. Slow responders simply miss out on that compounding effect.

And you’re rarely the only recipient: when a customer is open to multiple quotes, their request can reach other businesses through the Nearby Jobs feed. The clock starts the second they hit send. 57% of Yelp users contact a business within a day of researching, and 82% hire within a week — there is no “I’ll reply Monday” on Yelp.

The volume is real, too: over 85,000 project requests and messages go to service businesses on Yelp every day, and 84% of users prefer Request a Quote over calling.

What a slow reply costs in actual money

If you run Yelp Ads, you already know leads aren’t cheap — third-party breakdowns for home-service trades put it around $5–$25 per click and $30–$150 per lead. A plumber who lets three leads a week go cold at $50 a lead is leaving roughly $600 a month of ad spend on the table — before counting the jobs themselves, at the moment the customer was 2x more likely to engage with a fast, specific reply.

How to hit a 10-minute median without living in your phone

Push notifications + saved quick replies in the Yelp for Business app. Free. Works when you can grab the phone — which on a job site is the whole problem.
Route messages to whoever’s at a desk. Office manager, spouse, dispatcher. Covers business hours; evenings and weekends stay exposed (though 6pm–8am is at least excluded from the math).
Automate the first reply. A Yelp auto-responder answers every message in seconds with a personalized reply that references the customer’s request and asks a qualifying question — the same fast, specific reply style Yelp’s published guidance encourages. Because every message genuinely gets a fast, relevant answer, your median stays in the minutes and your response rate at 100%. Setup takes about two minutes — here’s the step-by-step guide.

FAQ

Does “Unable to service” count as a response? Yes. Declining properly protects your response rate; ignoring the message hurts it.

Do overnight messages hurt my response time? No — the 6pm–8am window is excluded. But the customer is still awake and still comparing. The math forgives a morning reply; the homeowner often doesn’t.

Is the response time badge based on average or median? Median over the last 30 days. Consistency matters more than heroic one-offs.

What response rate should I aim for? 100%. Every message — including ones you decline — should get an answer.