The short answer
In the largest published 2025 dataset, the average B2B cold email reply rate was 0.45%: 34,393 replies from 7,530,489 emails sent, measured across a full calendar year of agency campaigns (Belkins, 2026 study).
That number will look wrong to you if you have seen "5%" or "8%" quoted elsewhere. Both can be true of the same campaign. The difference is the denominator, and almost every disagreement about cold email benchmarks comes down to it.
This page sets out what the 2025 data actually shows by seniority, company size, industry and geography, explains why year-over-year "collapse" figures are mostly unreliable, and covers what to do about it.
Why cold email benchmarks disagree so wildly
There are two ways to calculate a reply rate, and they differ by roughly an order of magnitude.
Replies divided by opens. The traditional method. It flatters the number, because it only counts people who already engaged. This is where "5% is average" comes from.
Replies divided by total sends. The stricter method. Every email you sent is in the denominator, whether it landed, bounced, or went to spam.
Belkins moved to the second method for their 2025 study and were direct about the consequence: *"A 5% reply rate against openers and a 0.45% reply rate against total sends can describe the same campaign; they're just measuring different things."*
They switched because open-rate tracking stopped being trustworthy. The tracking pixel that measures opens was itself damaging deliverability across the industry through 2024, so many teams turned it off. Total sends is the only consistent baseline left.
The practical implication: before you compare your reply rate to any published benchmark, check which denominator it uses. A team hitting 4% against openers and a team hitting 0.4% against sends may be running identical campaigns.
Be careful with "reply rates have collapsed since 2018" claims
You will see a lot of trend charts showing cold email reply rates falling off a cliff over the last five to eight years. Treat them with suspicion, including any you have seen from us previously.
The problem is that the industry changed how it measures in the middle of the period. Belkins, who publish one of the few datasets large enough to be meaningful, explicitly decline to compare their 2025 figures to their earlier studies for exactly this reason: the earlier numbers used the opens denominator, the new ones use sends. Charting one against the other produces a dramatic decline that is substantially a measurement artifact.
What *is* supportable is the within-period trend, measured consistently:
- The first half of 2025 averaged a 0.50% reply rate
- The second half dropped to 0.40%: a 20% decline inside a single year
- The peak was February at 0.54%; the low was December at 0.35%
A 20% decline in twelve months, measured the same way at both ends, is a more credible signal than an eight-year chart assembled from incompatible methodologies.
Reply rates by seniority
The pattern here contradicts the common assumption that juniors reply more than executives.
| Seniority | Reply rate (2025) |
|---|---|
| Founders and owners | 0.57% |
| C-level | 0.42% |
| VP | 0.32% |
Source: Belkins, 2026 study, 7.5M emails.
Founders and owners are the most responsive group, outperforming C-level by roughly 35% and VPs by nearly 80%. The likely reason is structural rather than attitudinal: founders of smaller companies have no executive assistant filtering their inbox and no procurement process to route through. If the message is relevant, they read it themselves.
VPs are the hardest group to reach. They are senior enough to have filtering habits and gatekeeping systems, but rarely hold final say on the purchase, so the message frequently lands with someone who can neither act on it nor is motivated to forward it.
What this changes: targeting the highest title on the org chart is not automatically the highest-return play. This is also the seniority band where warm introductions matter most, because the structural barrier is access rather than interest.
Cold email reply rates for C-level executives
In the largest published 2025 dataset, C-level executives replied to 0.42% of cold emails, measured against total sends. Founders and owners replied at 0.57%, and VPs at 0.32% (Belkins, 2026 study). Company size compounds it: the same study found enterprises with more than 10,000 employees replying at 0.22%, so a CFO or CRO at a large company sits at the hard end of both curves.
Why C-level inboxes are so hard to reach
- Filtering happens before the executive reads anything. Assistants and inbox tools screen unknown senders, so a well-written email may never be seen.
- Peer signal is the triage rule. Executives make time for people their peers vouch for and default to ignoring everyone else. That is a rational response to volume, not a sign of bad copy.
- The cost of reading is high. At this level, every email read is time not spent on the business, so the bar for opening one is high.
If your C-level reply rate looks much higher, check what you are counting
- Auto-replies, out-of-office messages and unsubscribe requests counted as replies.
- Replies divided by opens rather than by total sends (see the denominator section above).
- Sends to personal addresses rather than work inboxes.
- Emails that were not really cold: a mutual connection, a recent event, or earlier contact.
- Small samples. A few early replies in the first batch of a sequence rarely hold.
What works better at C-level. An introduction from someone the executive already trusts, a peer dinner or roundtable, and useful public content that brings them to you. Cold email still has a place, but at this level it describes an access problem more than a messaging one.
Reply rates by company size
The relationship is close to linear, and it is the strongest single predictor in the dataset.
| Company size | Reply rate (2025) |
|---|---|
| 0-10 employees | 0.72% |
| 11-50 employees | 0.49% |
| 10,000+ employees | 0.22% |
Source: Belkins, 2026 study.
Very small companies reply at more than three times the rate of large enterprises. At a ten-person company it is difficult to email the wrong person; at a ten-thousand-person company it is difficult to email the right one, and several colleagues are probably receiving near-identical outreach the same week.
This does not mean enterprise accounts are not worth pursuing. It means cold email is the wrong primary instrument for them, and that the economics only work if the value per meeting is high enough to absorb a 0.22% reply rate.
Reply rates by industry
The spread between best and worst performing sectors is close to tenfold.
Food and Beverage led at 3.47%, roughly eight times the overall average. Education and Government also significantly outperformed. Belkins attributes this to lower outreach saturation and procurement cultures where responding to vendor contact is normal.
Construction, Financial Services, Healthcare and Legal Services clustered in the 0.56% to 0.60% range, above average and representing high campaign volume.
Banking and Insurance sat at the bottom: heavily regulated sectors with institutional gatekeeping and long procurement cycles.
Source: Belkins, 2026 study, industries with a minimum 20,000 emails sent.
Reply rates by geography
| Market | Reply rate (2025) | Volume |
|---|---|---|
| Poland | 1.43% | 46K emails |
| Ireland | 0.74% | modest |
| Denmark | 0.73% | modest |
| Canada | 0.63% | 266K emails |
| United States | 0.51% | 5.6M emails |
| United Kingdom | 0.48% | 370K emails |
Source: Belkins, 2026 study.
The pattern is saturation, not culture. The US and UK are the most heavily targeted cold email markets in the world, so the noise floor is higher. Poland's 1.43% comes off a much smaller base of inbound outreach.
Timing
Morning sends outperformed, reversing what earlier studies found.
- 8am to 12pm: 0.54%: the best window
- 5am to 8am: 0.52%
- Late evening (8-11pm): 0.40%, now the worst, previously the best
- Wednesday and Thursday: 0.48% each, the strongest weekdays
Source: Belkins, 2026 study.
The reversal is worth noting. Evening sends used to work because the email sat at the top of the inbox at the start of the workday. As AI-assisted inbox triage became common, that advantage appears to have been filtered away before the recipient ever saw it.
What good looks like in 2026
Against a total-sends denominator:
- 0.45% is the published average
- Above 0.7% puts you in the range of the best-performing segments
- Below 0.25% suggests either a deliverability problem or a targeting problem, not a copy problem
Against an opens denominator, multiply by roughly ten for a rough equivalent, and be explicit about which you are quoting when you report to a board.
The more useful framing is that reply rate is the wrong headline metric for most teams. Belkins booked over 1,200 appointments from 7.5 million emails. That is the number that matters, and it is a function of targeting and offer far more than of subject lines.
Where warm introductions fit
The honest position: we do not have a like-for-like third-party benchmark comparing warm-introduction reply rates to cold email reply rates on the same denominator, and we are wary of the multipliers that circulate in this category, several of which do not trace back to a real study when you follow the citation.
What can be said without inventing a number:
The barrier at the top of the market is access, not interest. The Belkins data shows VPs replying at 0.32% and enterprises at 0.22%. Those are not numbers you fix with better copy. They describe a filtering problem, and an introduction from someone the recipient already trusts bypasses the filter rather than trying to beat it.
Cold email economics get worse as deal size grows, exactly where they need to get better. The larger the target company, the lower the reply rate, while the cost of a meeting rises. That inversion is the structural case for relationship-led pipeline in enterprise segments.
Volume makes it worse, not better. Reply rate falls as send volume per mailbox rises, and deliverability enforcement has tightened. Scaling cold outbound now degrades the channel you are scaling.
If you want a number for your own warm-intro performance, measure it on the same denominator as your cold campaigns, or the comparison will not mean anything.
Related reading
- Double opt-in introductions
- Why cold outreach doesn't work
- Outbound is Broken: A CRO's Guide
- AI Outreach Tools Are Making Cold Email Worse
- The State of Warm Intros 2026
- The Buying Committee
- Multithreading
Related reading: Cold Email Reply Rates Fell 70%. Adjust Your Planning., Cold Outbound vs Warm-Intro Orchestration, Why Cold Outbound Stopped Working in 2025-2026
Frequently asked questions
What is a good cold email reply rate in 2026?
Against total sends, 0.45% is the published average across 7.5 million emails, and anything above 0.7% is strong. Against opens, the equivalent figures are roughly ten times higher. Always state which denominator you are using.
Have cold email reply rates really collapsed?
Within 2025, yes: 0.50% in the first half, 0.40% in the second, a 20% decline measured consistently. Longer-run "collapse" charts should be treated with caution, because the industry changed how it measures reply rates partway through the period and the two methods are not comparable.
Who replies most to cold email?
Founders and owners, at 0.57%. VPs reply least, at 0.32%. Company size matters more than title: firms with under 10 employees reply at 0.72% against 0.22% for enterprises above 10,000.
Which industries respond best?
Food and Beverage led at 3.47%, with Education and Government also well above average. Banking and Insurance performed worst. The spread between best and worst is close to tenfold.
When should I send?
Wednesday or Thursday, between 8am and noon. Late-evening sends, which used to be the top slot, now perform worst.
Should we stop doing cold email?
No, but stop expecting it to carry enterprise pipeline on its own. It still works for smaller companies and founder-level targets. For VP and C-level buyers at large organisations, the reply rates describe an access problem that a different motion solves better.
What's a good cold email reply rate at C-level in 2026?
In Belkins' 2025 dataset of 7.5 million emails, C-level recipients replied to 0.42% of cold emails, measured against total sends. Founders and owners replied at 0.57% and VPs at 0.32%. Treat anything well above that with suspicion until you have checked what is being counted, and remember the rate falls further at large companies.
