Cold email reply rate by month, April 2025 to September 2026
Of the contacts Sales.co first emailed in April 2025, 2.36% sent a human reply. For September 2026 it was 0.45%. Across all 1,279,153 contacts first emailed between April 8, 2025 and September 25, 2026, 0.83% sent a human reply and 0.25% a positive one.
Published September 3, 2026 · Rebuilt from Sales.co sending data October 6, 2026
What was counted
Every contact first emailed through the Sales.co sending tool in the window, grouped by the month of the first email. A human reply is a reply from the contact that is not an auto-reply, out-of-office notice, bounce or spam report. A positive reply is a human reply our classifier labelled interested, possibly interested, in an ongoing conversation or meeting booked. The rate is replies divided by contacts first emailed in that month, so it measures contacts, not emails sent.
The most recent months have had less time to collect replies. September 2026 is not finished, so its figure will rise a little as replies arrive.
The table
| Month first emailed | Contacts | Human replies | Human reply rate | Positive replies | Positive rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025-04 | 5,291 | 125 | 2.36% | 38 | 0.72% |
| 2025-05 | 18,822 | 356 | 1.89% | 122 | 0.65% |
| 2025-06 | 34,242 | 508 | 1.48% | 145 | 0.42% |
| 2025-07 | 38,403 | 581 | 1.51% | 124 | 0.32% |
| 2025-08 | 39,216 | 652 | 1.66% | 185 | 0.47% |
| 2025-09 | 61,372 | 794 | 1.29% | 223 | 0.36% |
| 2025-10 | 54,084 | 508 | 0.94% | 81 | 0.15% |
| 2025-11 | 81,152 | 768 | 0.95% | 224 | 0.28% |
| 2025-12 | 89,825 | 572 | 0.64% | 148 | 0.16% |
| 2026-01 | 115,913 | 721 | 0.62% | 176 | 0.15% |
| 2026-02 | 89,261 | 558 | 0.63% | 181 | 0.2% |
| 2026-03 | 90,423 | 798 | 0.88% | 240 | 0.27% |
| 2026-04 | 70,427 | 489 | 0.69% | 174 | 0.25% |
| 2026-05 | 70,753 | 573 | 0.81% | 222 | 0.31% |
| 2026-06 | 94,896 | 741 | 0.78% | 275 | 0.29% |
| 2026-07 | 144,317 | 921 | 0.64% | 298 | 0.21% |
| 2026-08 | 111,362 | 624 | 0.56% | 206 | 0.18% |
| 2026-09 | 69,394 | 313 | 0.45% | 124 | 0.18% |
Download the table as a CSV: cold-email-reply-rate-by-month-2025-2026.csv.
Two periods
For the 422,407 contacts first emailed from April to December 2025, the human reply rate was 1.15% and the positive rate 0.31%. For the 856,746 contacts first emailed from January 1 to September 25, 2026, they were 0.67% and 0.22%. Volume more than doubled between the two periods, from 422,407 contacts in nine months to 856,746 in just under nine.
These are our own campaigns, for our own clients, and they say nothing about cold email that Sales.co does not send. The full report, with the per-client breakdown and what we changed along the way, is Cold email is dying and there is nothing you can do about it. For reply rates by industry, seniority, company size and tone, see the cold email statistics report, and for the all-in response rate on every send, the cold email response rates page.
Why this page changed
Until October 6, 2026 this URL showed a 17-year series, split by mailbox provider. Sales.co began in 2022, our sending data in this form starts in April 2025, and we could not document a source for the earlier years, so the series was withdrawn. Nothing here predates April 2025.