ABSTRACT We gain insight into the effects of gravitational lensing on the estimated distribution of merging binaries observed through gravitational waves. We quantify the efficiency of magnification for gravitational wave events in the geometric optics limit, and we compare it to the electromagnetic case by making minimal assumptions about the distribution of intrinsic properties for the source population. We show that lensing effects leave a recognizable signature on the observed rates, and that they can be prominent only in the presence of an extremely steep mass function (or redshift evolution) and mainly at low inferred redshifts. We conclude that gravitational magnification does not represent a significant systematic for gravitational wave merger studies in the LIGO–Virgo era.