Every public cold email benchmark, compared

What this means for you

The cold email reports side by side

Current platform and agency reports first, older and survey-based ones further down. Every figure is linked; quotes are the source's own words. Scroll the table sideways on a phone.

Why there's no median of medians

I wanted one number for this page, and the definitions don't allow it. Of the six reports from 2025 and 2026 with logged data and a headline rate, no two divide by the same thing:

• Per email sent: Instantly 3.43% (average, bounces apparently in), Belkins 0.45% (auto-replies out, bounces in).
• Per delivered email: Saleshandy 4.5% (auto-replies apparently in).
• Per recipient of a sequence: Hunter 4.5%.
• Per contact, median sender: Smartlead 0.74%.
• Median of companies' campaigns: Woodpecker 1.5%.

A median of those six would mix averages with medians and emails with people, and it would be quoted everywhere within a month. So the honest answer is a range with its labels: 0.45% to 4.5%, and the definition decides where in that range a sender lands. If you write about this, quote the report whose definition matches what you're measuring.

Where our own numbers sit

On the definition closest to Saleshandy's (per delivered email), our sequences got 2.07% across all steps and 3.07% on the first email, which puts the first email well above the per-step figures elsewhere: Belkins 0.59%, Smartlead 1.18%, Woodpecker's 1.0% median, Hunter's 2.9%. That's three companies with tight, mostly Dutch lists, not a platform average, and the method and limits are on the follow-up statistics page. Per recipient, the definition Hunter uses, 4.2% of the 6,411 people we emailed replied, against Hunter's 4.5%. Our bounce rate of 1.54% sits under Hunter's 3.6% average and under the 2% Instantly tells senders to stay below; the verification page shows the list check behind it.

LinkedIn outreach reports

Three different reply rates travel under one name here: per request sent, per accepted connection, and per message. They differ by a factor of ten.

Our acceptance rate over every request, 21.1%, sits at HeyReach's typical campaign and below the pooled platform figures. Our reply rate per accepted connection, 43.3%, is above every overall per-accepted figure published, including Reachium's 27.55%, which uses the closest method. The fair check is Reachium's own connection note study: "Among accepted LinkedIn connections, 47.8% replied when the request carried a note against 25.5% when it did not." Every one of our requests carried a note, so like for like we're in the same range, not ahead. And one number has no public benchmark at all: people who had engaged with a post first accepted 65.8% of the time, on a small group of 38. No report I found splits acceptance by whether the person already knew the sender.

Europe: what exists, and what doesn't

Several of these vendors are European (Woodpecker is Polish, Waalaxy and lemlist French, Sopro and Cognism British), and almost all of them publish global numbers. What I found for Europe, read at the source:

• Cold email reply rates by country. Only Belkins, on its own agency campaigns, per email sent: Poland 1.43%, Ireland 0.74%, Denmark 0.73%, UK 0.48%, against the US at 0.51%.
• Open rates by country. Woodpecker's medians: France 38%, Germany 36%, Poland 32%, UK 24%, US 23%. Opens, so read them with the Apple Mail caveat.
• LinkedIn reply rates by country. Belkins, on Expandi data, per message: "Continental European markets, particularly the Netherlands, Denmark, and Belgium, lead the table by a significant margin", with the Netherlands at 10.5% against the US at 6.0%. Waalaxy's e-book has the Netherlands top at 22.67%, on its own per-message definition.
• Cold calling. Cognism reports "a standout 16% success rate in Europe throughout 2025" against a 2.7% industry average, without defining success. Belkins found a 14.7% live-answer rate in the UK against 9.0% in the US.

What I looked for and didn't find: any cold email reply rate for the Netherlands, Germany, France or Belgium; any LinkedIn acceptance rate by country; lemlist, Waalaxy, Brevo or Mailjet data on cold email results; any Dutch or German research body measuring outbound. Searches in Dutch and German turned up only pages repeating the US vendor figures. That gap is why our own data, mostly Dutch, is published at all. The wider European market numbers (buying online, cloud and AI adoption, the outbound rules by country) are on European B2B sales statistics.

Report by report

The detail behind each row: what else it says and why it doesn't line up with the others.

Checked and left out

• No own data: lemlist's cold email benchmarks ("Every number in this article comes from a named, public source"), Apollo, Overloop, Martal, Klenty, Linked Helper, Leadriver and Cognism's LinkedIn statistics all cite other vendors.
• Gated or unreadable: Sopro's State of Prospecting 2026 and Gong's 85-million-email guide sit behind forms; Sales.co's original study returned a 404.
• No sample or period: Outreach's "Icebox" post, Orum.
• Not about reply rates: Salesloft's 2026 benchmark (a survey of 500 US decision-makers) and the Bridge Group SDR report (a survey of activity and quota).
• Older editions: Hunter's State of Cold Email 2025 (11 million emails from 2024, "the average reply rate to a campaign is 4.1%") is replaced by the 2026 edition above.

Method

• Inclusion. A report is in if it publishes figures from its own data (logged or surveyed) on a page anyone can open. Roundups that only repeat others are listed above and left out.
• Reading. Every figure was read on the source page or PDF itself between 19 and 20 October 2026. Where a page doesn't define something, this page says "not stated" rather than guessing.
• No recalculation. Figures are shown as published. Where a page contradicts itself (Saleshandy's period, Waalaxy's totals), both versions are named.
• Disclosure. I sell outbound services, and our own numbers appear on this page. They're kept in their own rows and sections, with their own method pages.