I run CallForMe, a service that lets an AI agent phone a business. Hold is where the cost of a long call comes from, so I wanted real numbers. On November 2 and 3, 2026 we called 34 big US customer service lines and timed how long each one took to put a live person on the line.
25 of the 34 did. The median was 3 minutes 38 seconds.
The method
- Our own calls only, never customers' calls.
- Each number came from the company's own contact page.
- The clock starts when the line answers and stops when a person first speaks, read from each call's transcript. So it includes the menu and the hold.
- One short question per call (the line's hours), then we hung up, so a representative's time was barely used.
These are single calls on single days, so read each one as a snapshot.
By industry
| Industry | Lines | Median to a person | Never put us through |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phone carriers | 3 | 1:24 | 2 |
| Banks and cards | 7 | 2:07 | 4 |
| Internet and TV | 3 | 3:38 | 0 |
| Stores | 4 | 3:39 | 0 |
| Airlines | 6 | 3:51 | 0 |
| Insurers | 4 | 3:58 | 1 |
| Government | 3 | 11:00 | 1 |
| Shipping | 3 | 15:38 | 1 |
The longest waits that ended with a person were USPS at 23:04 and Delta at 20:27.
The 9 that never connected us
A short hold is no use if the menu won't let you in.
- Chase asked for a Social Security, tax ID, card or account number before it would route the call.
- Bank of America asked for a full account number and ended the call when there wasn't one.
- AT&T wouldn't route the call without a 10-digit phone number on an account.
- Verizon's AI assistant asked whether it was talking to a person or an automated system, then said representatives weren't available and pointed to the app.
- FedEx sent us to its website and virtual assistant, then ended the call.
- IRS said call volume was too high to transfer us and to try again later.
- Discover asked for the last four digits of a Social Security number, queued us, and hung up after 2:17.
- Progressive estimated 15 to 30 minutes in queue. Nobody answered within our 30-minute limit.
- PayPal transferred us to a queue that played nothing at all, and our silence limit ended the call.
What it means if you're building a voice agent
A phone line is an interface with no docs, and most of these gates are account checks. An agent can't get past them alone, and it shouldn't try: card numbers, SSNs and one-time codes shouldn't go through a model at all. What worked for us is connecting the person for that one step, then letting the agent go back to waiting on hold.
On menu type: lines that asked you to speak and lines that said they were an AI assistant both came in under 4 minutes at the median. The 2 keypad lines were slower, but 2 lines is too few to mean much.
The data
The full table, one row per company with the number, date, seconds and the reason when we didn't get through, is on the hold times page, with a CSV and JSON you can reuse under CC BY 4.0.
