CMS Phone Wait Times: The 31 Minute Hold the DWP Confirmed

Three things stand out. The average across the year runs at roughly 20 minutes, and that is the average, meaning plenty of calls waited far longer. The summer is consistently the worst time to call, with the average peaking at 31 minutes in August 2024. And these are waits just to be answered: they say nothing about whether the call resolved anything, and the DWP confirmed in the same response that it does not track data on individual calls at all, so it could not say what its longest wait was.

The usual caveat applies: this is management information, not quality assured to official statistics standard. It is also entirely consistent with what the service handles, which is around two million calls a year, as covered in our look at how the CMS actually runs.

How to spend less of your life on hold

• Call early, and avoid the summer if you can. The data shows waits climbing from May and peaking in August. If your issue can wait until autumn, the queue will be a third of the length.
• Use your online account for anything routine. Payment schedules, statements and reporting many changes can be done through the CMS self-service portal without joining the queue.
• Put anything that matters in writing. A call leaves no record you can rely on later; a letter or message through your online account does. Every dispute guide on this site says the same thing because tribunals and complaints run on paper, not on what someone remembers saying on the phone. Our evidence checklist explains why this matters.
• If a delay costs you money, complain. Persistent failure to answer or act is a service failure. Use the complaints letter generator, and escalate to the Independent Case Examiner if the CMS response does not fix it.
• The line itself is free. CMS enquiry lines are freephone numbers, so the cost of the queue is your time rather than your phone bill. Call from a charged phone and do something else while you wait.

Why this matters more than it looks

A 20 to 31 minute average wait is not a customer service statistic in isolation. Payments stop arriving, employers fail to action deduction orders, and assessments go wrong partly because the main channel for reporting problems is one many parents cannot face using. A receiving parent on a lunch break cannot hold for half an hour. A paying parent trying to report a job loss before arrears build up faces the same queue. When the government talks about moving every case onto a collection service, as tracked on our reforms page, the capacity of the phone lines behind it is a fair question to keep asking.