When do homeowners send enquiries? What 67,379 Facebook leads show

When we read clients’ lead apps, the same thing keeps coming up. Someone fills in a form in the evening, gets nothing back until the next day, and by then they’ve moved on. In all 27 lead reviews we’ve done, someone sent their details and was left waiting. So we went back to the time stamps: every Facebook lead form our clients received in a year.

What time of day do homeowners send enquiries?

From about 9am to 10pm, steadily, with the peak at 6pm. Enquiries build from 6am, hold level through the working day, rise slightly into the early evening and only drop away after 10pm.

Put another way:

More than a third (36.6%) came in between 5pm and midnight. That’s when people are home, the kids are in bed and they finally look at the gutter, the drive or the tree they’ve been meaning to sort. It’s also when most tradespeople have put the phone down for the day.

The pattern is much the same in every trade. Between 5pm and midnight, roofing had 36.7% of its enquiries, tree surgery 35.2%, landscaping 35.3%, driveways 37.4% and carpet cleaning 38.8%. Carpet cleaning’s busiest hour was 9pm.

Which day of the week is busiest?

Sunday, but every day counts. The quietest days, Friday and Saturday, had 13.9% each. Sunday had 15.1%. Over a year that’s the difference between 9,342 enquiries and 10,207.

Sunday was the busiest day for driveways (16.0%), landscaping (16.7%), tree surgery (15.6%) and carpet cleaning (14.9%). Roofing was the exception: Monday edged it, at 14.8%. Weekend enquiries together made up 29.1% of the year.

What does this mean for you?

If you only answer enquiries between 8 and 5, Monday to Friday, about half of them wait. Some will still be there in the morning. Plenty won’t, because they’ve asked two other firms and one of them got back first. In the six lead reviews that counted it exactly, 72 of 236 real enquiries (31%) never replied to anything. Timing is a big part of why.

You can’t be on the phone at 9pm every night, and you shouldn’t have to be. What you can do:

1. Reply instantly, automatically. A text in your name the moment the form comes in, at 6pm on a Tuesday or 10am on a Sunday. It tells them you’ve got it and when you’ll call. Every Lead Wave enquiry gets one within seconds.
2. Call the evening enquiries first thing. Make the morning call-back list your first job, before the first site. Someone who enquired at 9pm and hears from you at 8am is still warm.
3. Don’t switch your ads off at the weekend. Sunday is the busiest day. Answer with the instant text and book them in on Monday.
4. Follow up the ones who go quiet. Plenty of people don’t answer the first message. Follow-ups that keep going until they reply, then stop on their own, catch the ones who enquired late and forgot. There are ready-made messages in quote follow-up messages.

What happens after the enquiry decides most jobs. There’s more on what we found reading 1,282 lead conversations in are Facebook leads any good.

How did we work this out?

We took every Facebook lead form sent to Lead Wave clients’ ads between 13 October 2025 and 11 October 2026. That’s 364 days, so exactly 52 of each weekday, which keeps the day-of-week comparison fair. Times are UK time.

• Day of week: all 67,379 leads.
• Hour of day: the 64,890 leads where Meta recorded the hour. For the other 2,489, the client’s ad account couldn’t be read hour by hour.
• One count per lead. Meta lists the same lead under several labels, so we counted one label only.
• Checked against a second export: 1,765 of 1,865 campaign-months matched exactly (95%), and the second source was 2% lower overall.
• Counts only. No names, no client details, no spend.

This is about when people fill in a form on a Facebook ad. It doesn’t cover phone calls, Google searches or people who message a page directly. Those may well follow a different pattern.