Every skip tracing quote leads with price per record. None of them leads with the number your dialer floor actually pays: the cost of a contact that rings and reaches the owner. This calculator does that arithmetic — plug in any vendor’s quoted numbers and your tested rates, and compare offers on the line that matters.
The pre-filled values are illustrative defaults, not a benchmark or a quote — replace them with your vendor’s quoted price and your own tested rates.
How to read the result
- Total spend is list size × price per record — what the invoice says.
- Dialable contacts applies the match rate, then the share of matches that are working, right-party numbers. This is the list your agents actually experience.
- Cost per dialable contact is the honest unit price. A $0.10 append at a 40% working-number yield costs more per conversation than a $0.20 append at 90%.
Three levers that move the number
Owner-of-title matching raises the right-party share — a phone tied by name to the person on the deed beats one tied to the address. Dead-number replacement raises the working share at no extra spend. And list quality upstream compounds both: skip tracing a signal-built list (storm-hit, aging roof, fresh mover) means the contacts you do reach have a reason to stay on the line. The full breakdown is in how accurate is skip tracing?
Frequently asked questions
What is a typical price per record for bulk skip tracing?
Advertised per-record prices in the market run from pennies to around fifty cents depending on volume, vendor, and what’s bundled — most vendors also require a monthly subscription. The sticker price is the least informative number on the quote; the working-contact yield is what moves your cost per conversation.
What match rate should I expect?
Vendors commonly advertise match rates of 80% and up. Treat those as upper bounds: the match rate counts any phone returned, not phones that ring and belong to the current owner. Test on a sample of your own records before extrapolating.
How does dead-number replacement change the math?
Replacement guarantees effectively raise your working-number rate without raising the price — every disconnected number swapped for a live one moves the bottom-line cost per dialable contact down. Our lists replace dead numbers as standard, which is why we tell buyers to compare on that line, not the per-record sticker.