Phone automatically declining calls

FIRST: Are there missed calls in Phone/Recents on the phone? If they are not the problem is in the network, because the calls aren’t getting to your phone. Contact your carrier: 

• check with your carrier that they don’t have a local outage, and that you didn’t have any settings that would have immediately invoked voicemail
• check up on them at Down Detector - outages

If they are in Recents here’s what to check:

• Check the MUTE switch on the left side of the phone, above the volume buttons. It should be towards the screen
• Check the volume setting. With the Home screen displayed, press the VOLUME UP button on the left side of the phone. It’s above the VOLUME DOWN button.
• Go to Settings/Phone. There’s a switch for Silence Unknown Callers. If it is on any calls from numbers not in your contacts will go directly to voicemail.
• Also in Settings/Phone: Make sure Call Forwarding is off.
• iOS 14 & older: Go to Settings/Do not Disturb. Turn it off if it is on. Also turn off Scheduled. With both off none of the other switches there matter.
• iOS 15: Go to Settings/Focus, and verify that all focus settings are disabled.
• Go to Settings/Sounds & Haptics. Make sure there is a sound assigned to Ringtone.
• Go to Settings/Accessibility/Touch/Call Audio Routing and make sure Auto-Answer Calls is off.
• Go to Settings/Screen Time/Communications Limits. Tap each of the 2 entries and make sure both are “Everyone"
• Restart your phone-->RESTART your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch - Apple Support
• If all else fails, talk your carrier into replacing your SIM card (thanks to ASC user DShelbyD)

I’ve been having the same problem. By experimenting I discovered that in my case it’s related to the phone “calls on other devices”. I have an iPhone XS and an iPad Air-4.

Turning off this option fixes the problem. A pity as I like the option to answer on the iPad. I think the problem was introduced with IOS 15.4 and is still there in 15.4.2. Restarting both devices does not fix the problem.