Your figure
Use your real average ticket rather than your headline price — the number that matters is what the slot would have produced, not what it lists at.
Be honest. Most practices refill far less than they believe, because a two-hour warning is not enough time.
- Empty slots a week
- 9
- Weekly loss after refills
- $648
- Across a 48-week year
- $31,104
- What a third fewer would be worth
- $10,368
A third is the middle of what reminder programmes report. Not a promise.
Sixty appointments a week, 15% missed, a $90 ticket, and one in five slots refilled: 9 empty slots a week, $648 of work that does not happen, $31104 across a 48-week year — and cutting the rate by a third would be worth $10368 of that.
Assumptions behind these numbers
- 48 working weeks, which allows for holidays and closures. If you run 52, the annual figure is about 8% higher.
- It values a missed slot at the average appointment, not at the marginal one. For a practice running below capacity this understates the loss, because the fixed costs run regardless.
- The refill share is the input people get most wrong. Refilling means someone else occupied that specific hour, not that the patient rebooked for next month.
- A third fewer is the middle of the range that published reminder studies report, and those studies are mostly single-clinic. Treat it as a plausible order of magnitude, not a forecast.
The figure this produces is revenue, not profit. What makes it feel worse than it looks is that the costs behind that hour — rent, salaries, equipment finance — were incurred anyway, so most of the loss falls straight through to the bottom line.
Why the number surprises people
A no-show does not feel like a loss in the moment. It feels like a gap: a cancelled hour, a chance to catch up on notes, a coffee. The loss is invisible precisely because the alternative — a full day — is the normal state you are comparing against without noticing.
It also arrives in units too small to register. One missed appointment is $90 and nobody runs a business on $90. Nine a week for a year is a salary, and no single event in that year ever presented itself as a decision.
This is the same structural problem as scope creep, unbilled hours, and every other loss that accumulates in increments below the threshold where anyone reacts. The fix in all of them is identical and unexciting: count the thing, somewhere you will see the total.
The same calculation at different scales
All at a 15% rate and a 20% refill, varying only size and ticket, so the shape of the problem is visible.
| Practice | Appts/week | Ticket | Weekly loss | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solo therapist | 25 | $110 | $330 | $15,840 |
| Two-chair salon | 80 | $45 | $432 | $20,736 |
| Small dental practice | 60 | $90 | $648 | $31,104 |
| Three-clinician physio | 120 | $70 | $1,008 | $48,384 |
| Specialist consultancy | 18 | $400 | $864 | $41,472 |
Source: Illustrative rows computed with the calculator above, not survey data. The ticket values are plausible mid-points, not benchmarks.
The last row is the interesting one: eighteen appointments a week and the second-largest annual figure in the table. Ticket size dominates volume, which is why high-value practices with low volume are the ones where a reminder system pays for itself fastest.
Questions
Should I use my list price or what I actually collect?
What if we overbook to compensate?
Is a 15% no-show rate bad?
Does a no-show fee fix this?
The benchmark behind the 15%
Published ranges by sector, with the spread shown rather than averaged away.
What did it say?
In the context field: your annual figure. I am collecting the distribution, and it is more interesting than any survey.