I get some version of this question every week. Are data leads still worth it? My honest answer is that they're worth less than they were last year, they'll be worth less again next year, and the reason has almost nothing to do with the quality of the data. It has to do with what happens when you dial the number.
Most lead comparisons still argue about list quality, opt-in freshness, and cost per record. I think that debate is five years out of date. The real story is that the phone system itself has turned against outbound calling, and every lead product built on an outbound dial is getting squeezed by the same wall of filters. I want to walk you through that wall first, because once you see it, the rest of the lead market makes a lot more sense.
Why Is Nobody Answering Outbound Calls Anymore?
Nobody answers because three filters now sit between a dial and a ring: consumer habit, carrier spam scoring, and on-device call screening, and all three tighten every year.
Start with the answer rate collapse. First Orion tracked answer rates for calls from unknown numbers falling from about 80% in 2017 to below 50% by 2022, and that slide started before any single phone feature you could blame it on. CallLogic's industry data puts answer rates for unknown numbers at under 10% today, down from roughly 50% a decade ago. And Pew Research found in 2025 that 8 in 10 U.S. adults generally ignore calls from unknown numbers. Read that one again. The default behavior of the American consumer is now "don't answer."
It gets harder before your call ever reaches a human, because the carriers are filtering too. Under the STIR/SHAKEN caller verification framework, roughly 85% of Tier-1 inter-carrier traffic is signed, but only about 17.5% of traffic from smaller providers is. An unsigned call from an unknown number starts life scored as likely spam. And once a number picks up a spam label, the damage is immediate: PanTerra reports that a single spam label drops a number's answer rate 40 to 60% overnight, and Convoso has documented 20 to 50% overnight drops after labeling events.
The filters are aggressive enough that they're catching legitimate calls along the way. A 2025 Google survey found that 31% of people missed at least one important call because it was incorrectly labeled spam. That's the environment every dial list lives in now. It doesn't matter how fresh the record is if the network has already decided you're noise.
You can watch the result show up in the cold calling numbers. Cognism's State of Cold Calling Report measured success rates falling from 4.82% in 2024 to roughly 2.3% in 2025. Cut roughly in half in a single year.
How Does iOS 26 Call Screening Affect Outbound Calling?
iOS 26's Smart Call Screening answers unknown-number calls itself, asks the caller to state a name and a reason, and only rings the phone if the answer passes, a prompt no predictive dialer can survive.
Apple built a receptionist into the phone. The screen transcribes the caller's answer (about 250 characters of it) and only then decides whether the call deserves to ring through. iOS is roughly 60% of U.S. mobile share, so this isn't a niche feature. It's the front door to most of your list.
Predictive dialers and auto-dialers can't respond to a screening prompt at all. The screen asks its question, the dialer has no answer, and the call dies as dead air. Convoso measured about 10% of outbound calls already routing into screening environments by January 2026, and that number only moves in one direction.
If your fallback plan was "fine, I'll text them first," iOS 26 also added Messages Screening for texts from unknown senders. The text-first workaround runs into the same wall.
Every Outbound-Originated Lead Product Stands on the Same Side of the Wall
Here's the part I think most agents haven't fully connected yet. Data leads, aged leads, co-reg leads, digital form leads, live transfers, and preset appointments look like six different products at six different price points. From the phone network's point of view, they're all the same event: an outbound call from a number the consumer doesn't recognize. The dial might come from you, or from a call center that transfers the caller to you, or from a booker who schedules a time for you to call back. It's still an outbound dial into the filter wall, and the wall doesn't care how good the list was or how much you paid for the appointment.
That's the frame I'd use to evaluate everything below.
Data Leads (Dial Lists)
What they are:
Names and phone numbers of people who fit a demographic profile or expressed interest somewhere online. You receive a list and dial through it yourself.
The appeal:
Low cost per lead. You can buy hundreds of records for a few hundred dollars. If you're willing to dial, it looks like a numbers game you can win.
The reality:
You are the outbound caller, so you absorb the full force of everything above: sub-10% answer rates, carrier scoring, spam labels, and now device-level screening your dialer can't talk its way past. The list can be accurate and current and it still won't matter, because accuracy doesn't make the phone ring.
Verdict:
Data leads don't fail because the data is bad. They fail because the phone no longer rings. Agents with industrial dialing operations and real number hygiene can still squeeze conversations out, but the math worsens every year, and the trend line isn't in your control.
Aged Leads
What they are:
Leads generated days, weeks, or months ago that have already been worked by other agents, sold at a steep discount.
The appeal:
Very cheap, often $1-5 per lead. The theory is that previous agents didn't close everyone, so there's still opportunity in the list.
The reality:
Everything that's true of fresh data leads is true here, plus the prospect has already been dialed by multiple agents. Numbers that get dialed heavily are exactly the ones carrier algorithms score down, so the aged list arrives pre-damaged on both ends: the person is tired of insurance calls and the network already treats the traffic as suspect.
Verdict:
Aged leads are cheap because the phone-network math on them is the worst in the industry. Some agents grind them profitably at high volume, but you're paying in hours what you saved in dollars, and the hours buy less every year.
Digital Form Leads (Social & Search)
What they are:
Prospects click an ad, fill out a form, and their contact information goes on your list. You still place the call.
The appeal:
Targeted, fresh, and someone did just express some level of interest. Typically $10-30 per lead.
The reality:
A form fill is passive interest, and the follow-up call is still an unknown number dialing into the wall. Speed helps a lot, because a call within minutes of the form fill is the one window where the prospect might actually be expecting the phone to ring. Miss that window and you're cold calling someone who forgot the form existed.
Verdict:
The best case for form leads is exclusive leads called within minutes. Anything shared or delayed converges on data-lead economics, with the same filter-wall problem doing the damage.
Co-Registration Leads
What they are:
People who filled out a form for something else and checked a box (or had it pre-checked) about also receiving insurance information. Sold to multiple buyers.
The appeal:
Very cheap, $2-10, and available in volume.
The reality:
The prospect wasn't looking for insurance, usually doesn't remember the box, and is being called by several agents at once. That's the lowest possible intent hitting the same wall as everything else.
Verdict:
The cost is low because the value is low. I'd pass.
Live Transfers
What they are:
A call center reaches the prospect first, screens them with qualifying questions, then transfers the live call to you.
The appeal:
Someone else does the dialing, and you only spend time on screened conversations.
The reality:
The product starts with an outbound dial. The call center is placing the same unknown-number call into the same filters your own dialer would face, which means the cost of reaching each prospect is rising for them too, and that cost flows through to your price. You're also relying on a screening conversation you can't see or hear.
Verdict:
A quality provider can make transfers work, but the structural position doesn't change: outbound origination, rising contact costs, and an intermediary between you and the intent. I've written a full comparison of live transfers and inbound calls if you want the long version.
Pre-Set Appointments
What they are:
A call center contacts prospects and books a time for you to call. You call at the scheduled time.
The appeal:
No dialing, no chasing, and in theory the prospect expects your call.
The reality:
The appointment was created by an outbound dial, and your callback is another one. To the prospect's phone you're just one more unknown number, which is a big part of why no-show rates run 20-50%. Interest also decays in the gap between booking and calling.
Verdict:
The appointment format hides the origination problem without fixing it. My detailed comparison of preset appointments and inbound calls goes deeper on why the structure works against phone-based sales.
Inbound Calls
What they are:
Prospects see advertising, decide they're interested, and dial the number themselves. The call routes directly to you.
The appeal:
This is the one lead type that never touches the filter wall. There's no unknown number calling the prospect, no screening prompt to fail, no spam score to survive, because the consumer originated the call. There is nothing to screen.
The reality:
Quality depends heavily on the advertising that generates the calls. Good creative produces clear, high-intent callers; vague creative produces confused ones. Price per call is higher than other lead types, and you should understand why before you buy.
Verdict:
Consumer-initiated inbound calls are the only product on this page whose economics aren't tied to answer rates on outbound dials. As the wall gets higher, that difference compounds.
The one-sentence version: data leads, live transfers, and preset appointments all originate with an outbound dial, so they all stand on the same side of the filter wall. A TV inbound call bypasses the entire wall because the consumer initiates it. There is nothing to screen.
The Real Comparison: Time vs Money
Even before the filter wall, the case against cheap leads was time. A $3 aged lead that takes 20 dials to produce one conversation costs you hours. A live inbound conversation costs you minutes. If your time is worth anything at all, the "expensive" call is often the cheaper product, and falling answer rates keep pushing that math further in the same direction. I've laid out the full arithmetic in The Real Math on Insurance Leads, including why the agent with the "worse" cost per acquisition frequently takes home several times more money.
Here's the short version. An agent who buys 100 aged leads for $300 and spends 20 hours dialing might get 15 conversations and close one deal, and that was the optimistic version of the story a few years ago. Run the same play through today's sub-10% answer rates and the hours go up while the conversations go down. An agent who takes 15 inbound calls spends about 5 hours actually talking with people who dialed in on purpose. The dollars per lead are higher. The dollars per policy usually aren't.
The Bottom Line
So, are data leads still worth it? For most agents, no, and I'd rather say that plainly than hedge. Not because the records got worse, but because the phone system that outbound calling depends on is being filtered more aggressively every year, by the carriers on the network side and now by the device itself. None of that reverses. Carrier scoring gets stricter, screening features ship to more phones, and consumer habits only harden.
If you're looking for the exceptions, they exist: you already run a disciplined, high-volume dialing operation with real number management, or you can buy exclusive form leads and consistently call them inside the first few minutes. Outside those cases, the honest answer to the question in the title is that the economics only worsen from here, because the filtering is structural. It's built into the network and the device, and it tightens every year.
Where That Leaves You
If you've read this far and recognized your own numbers, sliding contact rates, more dials for fewer conversations, a phone bill that buys less every month, I want to be clear that it isn't a skills problem. You're selling the same way you always have. The wall got higher, that's all, and no amount of grit out-dials a filter that answers the phone before your prospect ever hears it ring.
The way around the wall is to be on the other side of it, where the consumer places the call. That's the entire idea behind what we do: television and streaming ads that make the right person pick up their own phone and dial. If you want to see what that looks like in practice, start with how our inbound calls work, or run your own numbers through the income calculator using your close rate instead of mine.
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