The Longest Customer Service Calls From Abroad: Air Canada Averages 33 Minutes

Calling Air Canada from abroad took longer than calling anyone else in our data: 32.8 minutes on average, and more than a third of calls ran past half an hour. One in ten went past two hours. Two hours! That's from six months of calls CallTuv customers placed to customer service lines between 26 March and 23 September 2026, each one timed from the moment the line answered to the moment somebody finally hung up, which on some of these lines was a long way off. And 85% of them came from people who'd signed up outside the country they were dialling.

Tax offices weren't far behind. The Australian Taxation Office averaged 19.2 minutes, the Canada Revenue Agency 18.2 and HMRC 16.9, and between one call in six and one in four lasted more than 30 minutes at each. At the other end, a call to Chase averaged 7.4 minutes and a call to Amazon 7.3.

Then there's the IRS. It didn't fit at all. Two out of every three calls to the IRS were over in under two minutes, and on its line for callers abroad it was nearly four in five.

The short answer: which lines keep you on the phone longest?

Among the organisations our customers call most, these had the longest average calls:

For comparison, across every line in our directory the average call was 11.0 minutes. Median 5.5. Only 9% went past half an hour.

A call's length isn't a wait. It's the queue, the menu, the conversation and any transfers, all together. Still, when a third of the calls to one airline outlast a TV episode while the typical call to its rivals is over in about ten minutes or less, it's fair to say the queue is doing most of the work.

Air Canada: short calls, or very long ones

Air Canada's numbers split in two. The median call was only 6.3 minutes, and 30% of calls ended inside two minutes. Yet the average was 32.8, because the calls that did settle in kept going: 22% lasted more than an hour, and 10% more than two hours. The longest ran to 160 minutes.

That's what a long queue looks like from the outside. Some people give up fast. Others hear the first recorded message, sigh, and hang up. The rest put the phone on speaker, open a laptop and wait it out. Air Canada doesn't hide it, either: its own self-serve support page, read on 24 September 2026, says that "call wait times are longer than normal".

Could a few heavy callers be skewing it? We checked. Take out the single customer who called Air Canada most and the average barely moves: 32.8 minutes becomes 31.9.

Other airlines, for scale:

Emirates sits quietly at the bottom. Short calls, almost none past half an hour.

Tax offices: long everywhere except the IRS

Three of the ten longest lines above are tax authorities. No surprise there. A tax call is rarely one question: there's an identity check, a reference number that has to be read out twice, a pause while somebody pulls up a file from three years ago, and all of it tends to happen in the same few weeks before a deadline, when everyone else is calling too.

HMRC's own numbers point the same way. UHY Hacker Young, using HMRC data, reported an average wait of 18 minutes for the year to March 2025, and 558 years spent on hold in total. Our median call to HMRC, wait and conversation together, was 14.0 minutes. On +44 135 535 9022, the Income Tax number HMRC gives people calling from outside the UK, it was longer still: 22.4 minutes median, 23.4 on average.

The IRS is the odd one. Its average call is about half HMRC's. That would be good news if the median weren't 1.4 minutes. Every IRS line in our data had a short median, and the international one was the shortest: 78% of calls to 267-941-1000, the number the IRS gives "for international callers or overseas taxpayers", ended within two minutes, with a median of 1.2. Why? We can't tell from call length alone whether those callers reached a recording, a closed line or a queue that turned them away, and we won't guess. What we can say is that it's the only tax office in our data where a short call is the normal outcome, and that a two-minute call to a tax office rarely means the problem got solved. If you're calling it from abroad, we've written up the best time to call the IRS.

The shortest calls

Some big names kept calls short. None of these had more than 4% of calls past half an hour, and two of them, Chase and Capital One, are US banks, the same industry that put Bank of America and Navy Federal in the top ten:

HM Passport Office deserves a second look. Its average and median are almost identical, 8.3 and 8.1 minutes, and not one call in our data went past 30. Predictable. Which, if you're trying to sort out a passport from another country, is most of what you want.

By industry

Government has the widest spread of any industry. Its median call is just 3.0 minutes, yet 11% go past half an hour. So government lines tend to do one of two things: end almost at once, as 41% of calls to them did within two minutes, or drag on.

What a long hold costs when you're abroad

At home, time on hold costs you patience. Abroad it costs money. A call from a foreign SIM is billed by the minute whether anyone's talking or not, and a US toll-free number often won't connect from a foreign SIM at all. There's a separate guide to calling 1-800 numbers online.

From a browser or the CallTuv app, the rate depends on the number you dial, not where you're sitting. On our public price lookup on 24 September 2026:

Even a two-hour wait for Air Canada comes to $3.60. Calls are billed in whole minutes. One that doesn't connect costs nothing. And the per-minute price shows in the dialer before you press call, so a long wait holds no surprise at the end. Keypad presses land in the phone menu, too. That matters on lines where the first five minutes are "press 1, press 3, enter your booking reference".

The official numbers for callers abroad come from each organisation's own page: the IRS international taxpayers page, HMRC's Income Tax contact page (Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm UK time) and the ATO contact page, which lists +61 2 6216 1111 for English speakers calling from outside Australia, 8am to 5pm AEST on weekdays.

How we measured it

The calls. Every connected call CallTuv customers placed between 26 March and 23 September 2026 to a number in our directory of verified organisation lines, where the organisation that answered has been confirmed. Length runs from answer to hang-up. So it includes queues, menus and transfers along with the conversation itself. Calls that never connected aren't counted, and neither are accounts we've blocked.

Where the callers were. 85% of the calls came from accounts that signed up in a different country from the line they called (for +1 numbers, outside the US and Canada): 87% for Air Canada, 92% for HMRC, 93% for the ATO and 95% for the IRS. Signup country isn't where someone was standing when they called, so this is a close proxy, not a location log.

The organisations. An organisation's lines are grouped together, so Air Canada's figure covers every Air Canada number in the directory, and we only ranked organisations with enough calls from enough different customers for an average to mean something, then dropped any where three customers made up more than 40% of the calls, because a single person stuck on one long problem can otherwise drag a whole company's number up the table. That rule removed US Bank and Wise, which would otherwise have ranked fifth and eighth.

What this doesn't show. It isn't a measure of wait time. Nor is a long call proof of bad service: a complicated rebooking or a tangled tax problem can easily take 40 minutes after a real person picks up. It covers our customers, most of them abroad, so it may not match what a caller at home experiences. And it's one six-month window. Queues move.

Reuse is welcome with attribution and a link to this page.

Frequently asked questions

Which customer service line keeps callers on the phone longest?
In our data, Air Canada, by a distance. Calls to it averaged 32.8 minutes between March and September 2026, 35% ran past half an hour and 10% past two hours. The Australian Taxation Office, Services Australia, the Canada Revenue Agency and HMRC followed, at 17 to 20 minutes on average.

How long is the average customer service call?
About 11 minutes. Across every organisation line in our directory the average was 11.0 minutes and the median 5.5, while 9% of calls lasted more than 30 minutes and 2% more than an hour.

Why are calls to the IRS international line so short?
Two thirds of calls to IRS lines in our data ended within two minutes, and on the international line, 267-941-1000, it was 78%, with a median of 1.2 minutes. Call length alone doesn't say why. It's the only tax office in our data where a short call was the usual outcome.

How do I call HMRC from abroad?
For Income Tax and PAYE, HMRC lists +44 135 535 9022, Monday to Friday, 8am to 6pm UK time. Calls to that number in our data had a median of 22.4 minutes. From CallTuv it costs $0.04 a minute.

What's the ATO's phone number from overseas?
The ATO lists +61 2 6216 1111 for English speakers calling from outside Australia, 8am to 5pm AEST, Monday to Friday. More than a quarter of calls to the ATO in our data lasted over 30 minutes.

How can I avoid paying roaming charges while on hold?
Don't use your SIM. Call from a browser or an app that bills by the destination rather than your location. From CallTuv, US and Canadian numbers cost $0.03 a minute, so even a two-hour hold for Air Canada comes to $3.60, and calls that don't connect aren't charged.