19 October 2026 · 3 min read
Per-second vs per-minute call billing: why it matters for outbound teams
Many phone providers round every call up to the next minute. On an outbound floor full of short calls, that rounding can quietly become a large share of the bill.
Two providers can quote the same per-minute rate and send very different bills. The difference is the billing increment: the unit a call's length is rounded up to before it is charged. It usually sits in the small print, and for an outbound team it can matter more than the rate itself.
How billing increments work
Telecoms pricing is often written as two numbers, such as 60/60, 30/6 or 1/1. The first is the minimum charge in seconds; the second is the increment after that. Under 60/60, a 7-second call is charged as a full minute and a 61-second call as two. Under 1/1, every call is charged for exactly the seconds it lasted.
Why outbound calls are often short
Look at any outbound floor's call log and many connected calls are brief: a voicemail greeting, a wrong number, a receptionist, a quick 'not interested'. These calls are a normal part of the work, and under per-minute rounding each one costs a full minute.
A worked example
Take an agent who connects 120 calls in a day. Forty last about 10 seconds, forty about 40 seconds, and forty about three and a half minutes.
Billed by the second: 10,400 seconds of talk, or about 173 minutes.
Billed by the minute, rounded up: 40 + 40 + 160 = 240 minutes.
The rounding adds about 67 minutes, close to 40% more than the time actually spent talking, for one agent on one day.
Multiply that by a team and a month and it is no longer small print. A provider with a lower per-minute rate and whole-minute rounding can easily cost more than one with a higher rate billed by the second.
What to ask a provider
What is the billing increment, and is there a minimum charge per call?
Are calls that are not answered charged at all?
Is the rate the same for mobiles and landlines? In many countries, calls to mobiles cost more.
Does unused credit or unused minutes carry over, or expire at the end of the period?
Then run your own call log through both quotes. It takes ten minutes and settles the question with your numbers rather than theirs. What a calling minute actually costs you explains how to turn the result into a cost per conversation.
How ReachCalls bills
ReachCalls charges calls by the second: the talk time in seconds at the per-minute rate divided by sixty, with no rounding up to whole minutes. A call nobody answers has no talk time, so it costs nothing. Calls come out of a monthly call credit included with each plan; the credit belongs to that billing period and does not roll over, and when it is used up the dial pad says so plainly rather than letting calls fail. See the plans.
