Average cold outbound reply rates by year, 2010 to 2026, split by mailbox provider.
Sales.co compiled series · 17 years · Gmail, Outlook, other
Published: September 3, 2026 · Last updated: September 3, 2026
We tracked the rate and not the cause, so this is observation, not a finding. Two things happened around the 2024 break, and we note them as coincidence rather than explanation. Google and Yahoo introduced new bulk sender requirements in February 2024, which changed what a high-volume sender has to do to reach an inbox. AI-written outreach also spread over the same period, which would plausibly raise the number of messages competing for the same replies.
For the long slide before 2024, three things ran alongside it. Inbox volume went up, so each message competed with more messages. Mailbox providers tightened their handling of bulk mail, so part of the fall may be messages that never reached an inbox. Sequencers made high-volume outbound cheap, which raises volume and lowers the care per message.
None of these are measured here. For causes we can measure on our own sending, the cold email statistics report breaks reply rates down by industry, seniority, company size, tone and length.
These numbers sit well above the 2.66% response rate we measure across 1,288,605 emails sent through our own platform. They are two different measurements. This page is a year-by-year series of average outbound reply rates. That page counts every send through Sales.co between October 2025 and August 2026, including automated replies and bounces, against full send volume.
Use this series to see how the rate moved over time, and the platform benchmark when you want something to compare a current campaign against. Most senders respond to the trend by sending more or by targeting more narrowly; in our own campaigns, changing who is on the list moves the number more than adding rows to it. Our verified B2B email lists are sold by profession and industry.
Every value in the series, the provider split, and the CSVs. 2026 covers January 1 to September 3, 2026.
| Year | Reply rate | Change vs. prior year (pts) |
|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 22% | — |
| 2011 | 20% | -2 |
| 2012 | 19% | -1 |
| 2013 | 18% | -1 |
| 2014 | 17% | -1 |
| 2015 | 16% | -1 |
| 2016 | 15% | -1 |
| 2017 | 14% | -1 |
| 2018 | 14% | 0 |
| 2019 | 13% | -1 |
| 2020 | 12% | -1 |
| 2021 | 11% | -1 |
| 2022 | 10% | -1 |
| 2023 | 9% | -1 |
| 2024 | 4% | -5 |
| 2025 | 3% | -1 |
| 2026 (YTD) | 2% | -1 |
| Year | Gmail | Outlook | Other |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | 23.2% | 18.5% | 21.8% |
| 2011 | 21.2% | 16.2% | 20.2% |
| 2012 | 19.8% | 16.5% | 18.8% |
| 2013 | 18.7% | 15.8% | 18.0% |
| 2014 | 17.8% | 14.8% | 16.7% |
| 2015 | 16.6% | 14.1% | 16.3% |
| 2016 | 15.7% | 12.9% | 14.7% |
| 2017 | 14.5% | 12.2% | 14.3% |
| 2018 | 14.5% | 12.2% | 14.2% |
| 2019 | 13.7% | 11.0% | 12.9% |
| 2020 | 12.6% | 10.0% | 12.1% |
| 2021 | 11.4% | 9.8% | 10.9% |
| 2022 | 10.5% | 8.4% | 10.0% |
| 2023 | 9.4% | 7.7% | 9.1% |
| 2024 | 4.1% | 3.6% | 4.0% |
| 2025 | 3.1% | 2.6% | 3.0% |
| 2026 (YTD) | 2.1% | 1.8% | 2.0% |
60+ data points from 2M+ emails: reply rates by industry, seniority, company size, tone and CTA type.
1,288,605 emails: the average response rate is 2.66%, but 53.7% of the replies behind it are automated.
1M emails reveal C-level executives respond 3x more positively than directors and managers.
Sales.co compiled and tracked average cold outbound email reply rates by year for 2010 through 2026. The 2026 figure covers January 1 to September 3, 2026 and is year to date, so it can move before the year closes.
We track the rate separately for three groups of recipients, split by the mailbox provider on the receiving address: Gmail, Outlook, and everything else. The three provider series are published to three decimal places and shown rounded to one decimal above. The overall series is the usage-weighted average of the three, using the recipient mix of 67% Gmail, 22% Outlook and 11% other. For 2010 that is 0.67 × 23.176 + 0.22 × 18.520 + 0.11 × 21.798 = 22.0; the same weights reproduce the published overall figure for every one of the 17 years, which is why the overall column is a whole number in each of them.
Each annual figure is a percentage of contacts emailed. It is an average across senders and industries, so any individual campaign will sit above or below it, and the rounding on the overall series means the year-over-year steps are approximate rather than exact. All four series are published as CSVs and every derived figure on this page is computed from those values and nothing else.
This series is free to cite in articles, roundups, and research. Reference it as Sales.co, Cold Email Reply Rates by Year and link to this page.
Most-cited numbers from this series:
Data files: overall, Gmail, Outlook, other providers.
We run cold email campaigns end to end: targeting, copy, sending infrastructure, follow-up and reply handling.