We report integral cross sections for the elastic scattering of low-energy electrons by the hydrides PH₃, AsH₃ and SbH₃. To calculate the cross sections, we employed the Schwinger multichannel method with pseudopotentials (Bettega et al 1993 Phys. Rev. A 47 1111) at the static-exchange plus polarization level of approximation for incident energies from 0.5 to 8 eV. For PH₃, we compare our integral cross section with the recent total cross section measured by Szmytkowski et al (2004 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 37 1833) and find good agreement in shape. In particular, our calculated elastic integral cross section for PH₃ also shows the two structures reported by the experiment. We have found that the three hydrides present a Ramsauer–Townsend minimum at around 1 eV.