How many Google reviews do you need?
UK trade benchmarks by town, and the review calculator. Updated September 2026.
Quick answer
32 Google reviews is the median for plumbers in High Wycombe: half the 28 plumbers with premises in High Wycombe have fewer, half have more (checked September 2026). 50 puts a plumber in the top third there, 181 in the top 10%. Five more reviews would move a plumber sitting at the median past 2 competitors.
Source: 28 public Google Business Profile listings for plumbers with a street address in High Wycombe, read September 2026. Service-area listings with no address are excluded. No business is named on this page.
The local median, by trade and town
We hold 281 businesses with premises across 7 trades and 6 towns, and publish a median only where a town has at least 15 of them checked within the last 120 days. 12 markets meet that today.
Median reviews
32
28 plumbers with premises
Top third starts at
50
top 10% from 181
+5 reviews at the median
past 2
competitors
How review counts are spread among plumbers in High Wycombe
28 businesses. The band holding the median (32) is marked.
- under 104 (14%)
- 10 to 248 (29%)
- 25 to 49median6 (21%)
- 50 to 995 (18%)
- 100 to 2493 (11%)
- 250 or more2 (7%)
Half of the 28 plumbers with premises in High Wycombe sit between 14 and 76 reviews, a spread of 62. 43% have fewer than 25, so the bottom of this market is crowded and a small number of new reviews moves a listing a long way. 18% have reached 100 or more; the most-reviewed plumber has 444, and the top three average 308. The mean is 68, above the median, pulled up by a few large counts. For position, use the median: it is where the middle of the market actually is. On rating, the median plumber here is 5.0 stars and 100% are at 4.5 or above, which is why a rating alone rarely separates local plumbers; the count does.
Where does your listing sit?
Find your business on Google and we place its review count against the local median for your trade and town — free, two lookups a day per person, no sign-up. It uses the same figures as the chart above.
Google review calculator: rating, not position
Most calculators answer one question: how many five-star reviews it takes to move your average. That arithmetic is below, and it is exact, because Google's displayed rating is a plain mean rounded to one decimal. What no calculator can tell you is whether the result changes where you appear next to the other plumbers in your town — that is what the median and the chart above are for.
40 more five-star reviews takes 40 reviews at 4.6 to 4.8.
One new 1-star review would move 4.6 to 4.51; it takes 9 five-star reviews to get back to 4.6.
The questions people ask
- How many 5 star reviews to cancel a 1 star?
- It depends on your average, not your count. To get back to the rating you had before one 1-star review, you need (rating − 1) ÷ (5 − rating) five-star reviews: at 4.6 that is 9, at 4.8 it is 19, at 4.9 it is 40. The higher your rating, the more a single 1-star costs to undo, because each 5-star can only add a smaller amount above your average.
- How many 5 star reviews do you need to go up on Google?
- Your rating and your position are different questions. To lift a displayed rating by 0.1, a business with 40 reviews at 4.6 needs 14 more five-star reviews; with 200 reviews it needs 67. To move up among plumbers in High Wycombe, count matters more than rating: five more reviews takes a plumber at the median (32) past 2 of the 28 with premises there, because the middle of that market is bunched between 14 and 76 reviews.
- What is a good number of Google reviews?
- Good is relative to the businesses you appear next to. For plumbers in High Wycombe the median is 32, the top third starts at 50, and the top 10% starts at 181 (28 businesses with premises, September 2026). The most-reviewed plumber there has 444; the top three average 308. A count above the local median is good; above the top-third line is where a listing starts to stand out in the map results.
- How does Google calculate review scores?
- Google describes the displayed rating as an average of all the star ratings on the listing, shown to one decimal place; it publishes no weighting by age or length, and a rating left without any text counts the same as one with a review. Reviews Google removes as policy violations drop out of the average. Position in the map results is a separate calculation that Google does not publish; review count and rating are among its inputs, alongside distance and relevance.
- How do you calculate a 5 star rating?
- Add up every rating and divide by the number of reviews. Twelve five-stars and three four-stars is 72 ÷ 15 = 4.8. To find how many five-star reviews would take you from your current average A with n reviews to a target T, the formula is n × (T − A) ÷ (5 − T), rounded up. The calculator above does the arithmetic.
- Is 4.2 a good Google rating?
- Among plumbers in High Wycombe, the median rating is 5.0 and 100% of the 28 businesses with premises are rated 4.5 or higher (100% are 4.8 or higher). A 4.2 sits below most of that market, and because the average is a plain mean it takes a run of five-stars to move: 24 of them from 40 reviews to reach 4.5.
Where these numbers come from
For each trade and town we read the public Google Business Profile listings Google returns for that search — up to sixty — and keep only businesses with a street address in the town. Service-area listings with no address, suppliers and training providers, listings with fewer than three reviews, and businesses whose Google category is a different trade are all removed before anything is counted. A town is published only when at least 15 businesses survive that, and only while the figures are under 120 days old; a town whose figures go stale is withdrawn rather than shown as current. Every figure on this page carries its sample size and the month it was checked. We do not name businesses: the median, the spread and the count are the market; the names are not ours to publish.
Current selection: 28 plumbers in High Wycombe, checked September 2026. DriveMoreReviews is a review-request service for UK trades; these figures are published free and may be quoted with a link to this page.
Want to move up the ladder?
Five more reviews moves a plumber at the High Wycombe median past 2 competitors. DriveMoreReviews texts the customers you already have and sends each one to your Google listing.