[Guides](https://defrostmail.com/blog) # Cold email reply rates in 2026: six public benchmarks compared Updated November 9, 2026 Published cold email reply rates for 2025 and 2026 run from 0.45% to 4.5%. Five large studies give a typical figure: Belkins 0.45%, Smartlead 0.74%, Woodpecker 1.5%, Instantly 3.43% and Hunter 4.5%. They differ about tenfold mostly because they count different things: what a reply is, and whether it is divided by emails sent or by people written to. ## What do the six studies say? | Source | Reply rate | What “reply” means there | Sample and period | | Hunter, The State of Cold Email 2026 | 4.5% average: 45 replies for every 1,000 people written to | Counted per person, across a whole series of emails. Not formally defined. Automatic replies are not addressed. The report says most replies are negative. | 31 million emails sent by Hunter users in 2025 | | Instantly, Cold Email Benchmark Report 2026 | 3.43% average. Top quarter: 5.5% or more. Top tenth: 10.7% or more. | All replies received, including replies to follow-ups, divided by all emails sent. Automatic replies are not addressed. | Described as billions of emails across thousands of workspaces, with no exact count. January 1 to December 18, 2025. | | Woodpecker, cold email benchmark | 1.5% median | The formula is not given. | 56,614 campaigns sent in the last 90 days of 2025 | | Smartlead, State of Cold Email 2026 (first half) | 0.74% for the median sender: one reply for every 135 contacts | Replies per contact. Not formally defined. | More than 850 million emails, January to June 2026. Only senders of 500 or more emails are included. | | Belkins, 2025 study | 0.45% average. Founders and owners: 0.57%. C-level executives: 0.42%. Vice presidents: 0.32%. | Unique replies divided by emails sent. Automatic replies and bounced emails are removed. | 34,393 replies from 7,530,489 emails that Belkins, an agency, sent for its clients from January to December 2025 | | Gong, with two partners | No overall rate published. The top salespeople get 4.2 times the replies of average ones. | Not defined. | More than 28 million cold emails. Published July 24, 2025. | Each figure is from the publisher’s own page, read on November 9, 2026. Belkins’ totals work out to 0.457%, which it reports as 0.45%. Links are under Sources. ## Why do the figures differ tenfold? Four things separate them. - **What the replies are divided by.** Hunter counts replies per person, across every email that person was sent. Instantly and Belkins divide by the number of emails sent. Suppose you write to 100 people, five emails each, and five of them answer. Counted per person, that is 5%. Counted per email sent, it is 1%. - **Whether automatic replies are removed.** Belkins takes out automatic replies, such as out-of-office messages, and bounced emails. Instantly and Hunter don’t say whether they do. - **Average or median.** Instantly reports an average. Smartlead and Woodpecker report a median, the one in the middle. A few senders with very high rates can lift an average while the median stays where it was. Instantly’s own figures show how wide the spread is: its average is 3.43%, and its top tenth gets 10.7% or more. - **Who is sending.** Four of the publishers sell email software and report on what was sent through it. Belkins is an agency reporting on the emails its own team sent for clients. So the studies can’t be ranked against each other. Each one is a fair answer to a slightly different question. ## Is a reply the same as interest? No. None of the five says its rate is limited to people who were interested, and Hunter’s report says most of the replies it counted were negative. “No thanks”, “wrong person” and “please take me off your list” are all replies. That matters when someone quotes you a rate. “A 5% reply rate” can sound like five interested companies in every hundred. What the number counts is five answers. Defrost charges for one kind of reply only: a new company that asks to meet, asks for a price, or asks you to take a look at something. A polite no, an out-of-office and a referral to someone else don’t count. [Here is exactly what counts](https://defrostmail.com/pricing). ## What can a founder take from these numbers? - **Expect few replies.** Read together, the studies put a typical sender somewhere between one reply for every 20 or so people written to and one for every 200 or so emails sent, depending on the definition. - **Most replies are not interest.** The share of emails that start a real conversation is smaller than any figure in the table. - **A reply rate is not a rate of new clients.** A reply opens a conversation. Winning the client still takes a call, a proposal and a decision. - **An average tells you little about one careful sender.** Gong’s study of more than 28 million cold emails gives no overall rate, but it found that the top salespeople got 4.2 times the replies of average ones. When a provider or a piece of software quotes you a reply rate, four questions make it comparable: what counts as a reply, what it is divided by, whether it is an average or a median, and whose emails were measured. Which replies are worth counting is the subject of [What counts as a qualified reply](https://defrostmail.com/blog/what-counts-as-a-qualified-reply). Whether rates like these are enough for a firm like yours is in [Does cold email work for a consultancy, agency or service firm?](https://defrostmail.com/blog/does-cold-email-work-for-service-firms) ## Questions people ask ### What is a good cold email reply rate? There is no single figure. Published typical rates for 2025 and 2026 run from 0.45% (Belkins) to 4.5% (Hunter), and Instantly puts its top quarter at 5.5% or more. A rate only means something next to its definition: what counts as a reply, and what it is divided by. ### Why is Hunter’s reply rate ten times Belkins’? They count differently. Hunter counts replies per person across a whole series of emails and doesn’t say whether automatic replies are removed. Belkins divides unique replies by every email sent and removes automatic replies and bounces. The senders differ too: Hunter’s users on one side, one agency’s work for its clients on the other. ### Does a higher reply rate mean more clients? Not by itself. A reply rate counts every answer, including a no, and Hunter’s report says most cold email replies are negative. What matters to a firm is how many replies come from companies that want to talk. ## Sources - [Hunter, The State of Cold Email 2026](https://hunter.io/the-state-of-cold-email), read November 9, 2026. - [Instantly, Cold Email Benchmark Report 2026](https://instantly.ai/cold-email-benchmark-report-2026), updated January 12, 2026, read November 9, 2026. - [Woodpecker, cold email benchmark](https://woodpecker.co/cold-email-benchmark/), updated August 5, 2026, read November 9, 2026. - [Smartlead, State of Cold Email 2026 (first half)](https://www.smartlead.ai/benchmarks), read November 9, 2026. - [Belkins, 2025 study of cold email reply rates](https://belkins.io/blog/cold-email-response-rates), updated June 26, 2026, read November 9, 2026. - [Gong, with 30 Minutes to President’s Club and Outbound Squad: study of more than 28 million cold emails](https://www.gong.io/blog/does-cold-email-even-work-any-more-heres-what-the-data-says), July 24, 2025, read November 9, 2026. ## Short on time for this? Tell us what you do. It takes about three minutes and no card. If you’re a fit, we’ll tell you where we’d start. [Apply to Defrost](https://defrostmail.com/apply)