Is a 95% skip-trace hit rate good?

It's a hit rate, not an accuracy rate, so on its own it tells you almost nothing about deals. A 95% hit rate means 95% of records returned some contact data; it says nothing about how many of those numbers are correct or reach the right person. Judge a provider on its right-party-contact rate and your cost per right-party contact instead.

What is a right-party-contact (RPC) rate?

The percentage of skip-traced records where you actually reach the correct person - the property owner you intended to contact. It's the only skip-trace metric that maps directly to conversations and therefore to deals, and it's almost never quoted by vendors because it's much lower than the hit rate.

How do I test skip-trace accuracy myself?

Trace about 100 records you can partly verify, log the hit rate, then dial or text a sample and record how many reach the right person. Divide your total cost by the number of right-party contacts to get a real price-per-RPC you can compare fairly across providers.

All guides

Field guide / Methodology

How to read a skip-trace hit rate honestly

By Salah Boussettah · Updated 2026-06-16 · 6 min read

The short answer

A skip-trace 'hit rate' is the share of records that returned any phone or email - not the share that returned a correct, reachable number for the right person. Vendors quote the first because it's always high. What actually pays your bills is the right-party-contact rate, and the only way to know a provider's is to test a small batch yourself.

Three numbers that get blurred on purpose

Skip-trace marketing leans on one big percentage. The problem is that the impressive number and the useful number are not the same thing. Keep these three straight:

Hit rate (a.k.a. match rate): the percentage of your uploaded records for which the provider returned any contact data at all. This is the '95%' you see in ads.
Accuracy: of the numbers returned, how many are correct and current rather than disconnected, wrong, or belonging to someone else.
Right-party-contact (RPC) rate: the percentage of records where you actually reach the right person. This is the only number that maps to deals.

Why the gap is huge

A provider can hit 95% by returning a phone number for almost every record - even if many are stale, secondary, or wrong. A 95% hit rate with a 40% accuracy rate is a worse buy than an 80% hit rate with 75% accuracy. The headline rewards the wrong behavior.

Why a high hit rate can still waste your money

Hit rate ≠ dealsyou pay per match, but you only profit on right-party contacts

Most providers bill per match - so a high hit rate means you pay for more records, including the bad ones. If those extra matches are wrong numbers, you've paid to inflate your dialer's bounce rate. The cost that matters isn't price-per-match; it's price-per-right-party-contact, and no vendor prints that on the pricing page.

How to test a provider yourself

You don't need our lab to sanity-check a provider. Run a controlled small batch before you trust a big one:

Take 100 records you know something about (your own farm area, ideally with a few owners you can verify).
Skip trace them and log how many returned any number (that's the hit rate the vendor would quote).
Actually dial or text a sample. Log how many reach the right person (RPC) versus wrong number or disconnected.
Divide your total cost by the number of right-party contacts. That price-per-RPC is the real number to compare across providers.

Where we stand on this

Our honest disclosure

We have not yet run our own paid, controlled skip-trace accuracy test across providers - it's a funded-later item on our roadmap, because doing it properly costs real money on multiple platforms. When we run it, we'll publish the batch size, the method, and the price-per-right-party-contact for each provider, dated. Until then, treat every vendor hit-rate claim as a hit rate, not accuracy.

One practical note from testing: DealMachine includes free unlimited skip tracing on its paid plans. That doesn't make its data more accurate than a paid-per-match provider, but it does lower the cost of a wrong number - you're not paying per lookup, so a mediocre hit on a record stings less than it would on a per-match service.

FAQ

Is a 95% skip-trace hit rate good?: It's a hit rate, not an accuracy rate, so on its own it tells you almost nothing about deals. A 95% hit rate means 95% of records returned some contact data; it says nothing about how many of those numbers are correct or reach the right person. Judge a provider on its right-party-contact rate and your cost per right-party contact instead.
What is a right-party-contact (RPC) rate?: The percentage of skip-traced records where you actually reach the correct person - the property owner you intended to contact. It's the only skip-trace metric that maps directly to conversations and therefore to deals, and it's almost never quoted by vendors because it's much lower than the hit rate.
How do I test skip-trace accuracy myself?: Trace about 100 records you can partly verify, log the hit rate, then dial or text a sample and record how many reach the right person. Divide your total cost by the number of right-party contacts to get a real price-per-RPC you can compare fairly across providers.

Keep reading

DealStackLab earns affiliate commissions on some outbound links, which fund the accounts and tests behind our reviews. Rankings are never for sale - see our disclosure. Prices and product details change; this guide was last updated 2026-06-16.