Survey response rate benchmarks

On SurveyMonkey’s 2025 platform data, typical survey response rates are about 22% for employee engagement surveys, 32% for customer feedback, 39% after an event and 49% for course feedback, with market and concept testing higher at 67%. Those benchmarks divide the people who started a survey by everyone who received it, so a rate built from finished responses will read lower for the same level of interest.

What the benchmark is measuring

A response rate is only comparable when the two numbers inside it are defined the same way. SurveyMonkey’s benchmark guide defines it as respondents who started divided by the number who received the invitation. Survey researchers use tighter definitions. The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) publishes Standard Definitions that separate response rates from cooperation and completion rates and set out formulas for how partial responses and people of unknown eligibility are counted.

That gives three questions to answer before comparing yourself with any figure:

• Numerator. Are you counting people who started, or people who submitted?
• Denominator. Are you counting everyone on the list, or only invitations that were delivered?
• Population. Did you invite everyone, or a sample?

The note on what makes a good survey response rate covers the channel figures and why a low rate is not automatically a biased result, so this guide sticks to benchmarks by survey type and how to read yours.

Benchmarks by survey type

The spread by type is wide, and it follows the relationship between the sender and the person asked.

Course feedback, 48.68%. Students have just finished something, the request comes from the institution they paid, and the survey usually arrives at a natural end point. The course evaluation form from a fictional training institute is built for that moment: nine questions, about three minutes, averages shared with the trainer after grades are released.

Post event, 38.81%, against pre event at 28.65%. People who attended have an opinion and a fresh memory. The event feedback form is sent the next morning for exactly that reason, and keeps to eight screens.

Customer feedback, 31.81%. A mixed category, from delighted regulars to people who bought once. The customer feedback survey embedded here asks six questions, only three of them required, and says on its welcome screen that it takes about ninety seconds.

Employee engagement, 21.51%, against general employee feedback at 43.05%. The gap is striking. The platform data does not explain it, but long annual engagement surveys ask more and can feel riskier to answer. Short, frequent instruments like the employee pulse survey, six fixed statements in under two minutes, are designed to ask little and to state plainly who sees what, which removes two common reasons for staff to skip a survey. Track your own pulse rate month by month rather than holding it against the annual engagement figure.

Market or concept testing, 66.58%. Often sent to panels or people who opted in to research, so the audience is primed to answer.

Benchmarks by industry and channel

Industry figures on the same data run from 15.95% for nonprofits and 16.89% for technology and software to 42.53% for retail and consumer goods and 44.70% for education. Industry is partly a proxy for channel and audience: education and retail surveys often go to people with a recent, concrete interaction, while nonprofit and software surveys often go to large lists with weaker ties.

Channel moves the number more than anything else on the platform data, from popups at the bottom to email and offline kiosks near the top. If your survey is embedded on a web page rather than emailed, compare it with web figures, not the email figure. The guide on how to share a form compares links, QR codes, embeds and email as channels.

For context outside commercial platforms, Pew Research Center reported typical US telephone poll response rates falling to 7% in 2017 and 6% in 2018, after holding around 9% for several years. Pew also reported that low response rates had not, on their own, made its phone polls inaccurate.

What moves your rate

Four things matter more than question wording.

The relationship. People answer senders they know and trust. A survey from the person who served you gets more answers than one from a no reply address.

Timing. Send while the experience is fresh. A delivery survey a week later is asking people to remember.

The promise. State how long it takes and keep to it. The customer feedback example shows a counter on every screen, so the promise is visibly kept.

A reminder. A reminder to the whole list a few days after the first message gives people who meant to answer a second chance. Plotting submissions by day shows how much it added, and whether a second reminder would be worth sending or would only irritate people.

Who asks. A survey sent in the name of a person, such as the course coordinator or the store manager, reads as a request rather than a broadcast.

The guide to improving form completion rate covers the other side of the problem, which is people who start and give up.

Calculating yours from a form

Take a fictional example. A training institute emails a course evaluation link to 140 students at the end of term. 61 submit it. The response rate, completes over invited, is 61 divided by 140, or 43.6%.

That looks lower than the 48.68% course feedback benchmark, but the benchmark counts starts. If 70 students opened the survey and 61 finished, a start based rate would be 50%, slightly above the benchmark. Neither number is wrong; they answer different questions. Report both when you have them, and always report the number invited and the date range beside the percentage.

For a survey sent in waves, calculate the rate per wave and overall. A falling rate across waves usually means list fatigue rather than a worse survey.

Reading the table

The table at the end of this article lists fifteen published figures with their source and year: nine survey types, five industries and the Pew telephone figure. Use the row that matches your survey type first, then the industry row as a sense check. Treat every figure as a range marker, not a target. A 30% rate from the right people, with a reminder and a record of who was invited, is a better result than 60% bought with a prize that attracted people who only wanted the prize.

Common mistakes

Comparing completes with a start based benchmark. Your rate will look worse than it is.

Using the whole list as the denominator when a fifth of emails bounced. Count delivered invitations where you can, and say which you used.

Chasing the number with pressure. Repeated reminders produce rushed answers from people who want the messages to stop.

Ignoring who is missing. A 40% rate made up almost entirely of one site or one customer type can mislead more than a 20% rate spread evenly.

Changing the survey between waves. The rate then mixes two different instruments.

Build it

A form here stores a response only when it is submitted; partial responses are not kept, so the responses table gives you completes, and the invitation count has to come from wherever you sent the link. The CSV export puts Submitted At in the first column, which makes a responses per day chart straightforward.

Two of the four add-ons help while a survey is live. Email alerts send each submission, with its values, to one address, so a small team sees responses as they arrive; the page on form email notifications shows what arrives. Webhooks post each response once as JSON to another system, with no retry, so reconcile that system against the export at the end. The tutorial on automating a form with add-ons walks through switching them on.