Free Churn Rate Calculator
Customer churn and revenue churn are different numbers, and conflating them is one of the most common mistakes in SaaS reporting. This calculator computes both, plus net revenue churn with expansion, so you can read your retention honestly.
Your inputs
Customers lost divided by customers at start.
Revenue lost divided by revenue at start.
After subtracting expansion revenue. Can be negative.
Compounded from monthly: 1 minus (1 minus monthly) raised to 12.
Churn is the metric SaaS retention teams and ecommerce subscription operators watch most closely. The customer-vs-revenue distinction matters: losing 10 small accounts is a different problem than losing 1 enterprise account at the same revenue total.
The formulas
Gross Revenue Churn (%) = (Revenue Lost from Churn + Downgrades) / Revenue at Start × 100
Net Revenue Churn (%) = (Revenue Lost - Revenue from Expansion) / Revenue at Start × 100
The three numbers tell three different stories. Customer churn is the headcount story: how many logos walked. Gross revenue churn is the dollar story without making the picture flattering. Net revenue churn is the only one that captures what most operators actually care about: whether the installed base is growing or shrinking in revenue terms, regardless of new sales.
When net revenue churn is negative, that's "net negative churn" and it's one of the strongest signals a SaaS business can produce. It means your existing customers, on average, expand faster than they cancel. Run that engine for a few years and revenue grows even with zero new logos.
How to read your result
Look at the three numbers side by side. The relationships between them carry more meaning than any single percentage.
- Customer churn much higher than gross revenue churn. Your lowest-value customers are leaving disproportionately. This is usually fine, sometimes even healthy: small accounts often have the highest churn structurally, and losing them frees up support capacity for accounts that matter.
- Gross revenue churn much higher than customer churn. The opposite, and a real problem. Your high-value customers are leaving, which means your product or pricing fit at the top end is breaking. Investigate before the trend compounds.
- Net revenue churn negative. Expansion exceeds losses. This is rare and excellent. Most public-company SaaS analysts treat consistent net-negative churn as a top-decile signal.
- Net and gross revenue churn similar. You're losing what you gain. Existing customers aren't expanding, which suggests pricing, packaging, or product depth issues. The fix is usually upsell motion, not retention work.
- Customer churn trending up quarter over quarter. The headline number for board reporting. Even a small monthly rise is significant because it compounds: a jump from 4% to 6% monthly is a 28-percentage-point swing in annual retention.
Pair this with the LTV calculator to see how retention compounds into customer value, and the MRR calculator to see churn alongside the other three MRR movements.
Industry benchmarks (2025 data)
Benchmarks vary by ACV, contract length, and customer segment. These ranges come from independent SaaS data sets and reflect medians, not targets. Your number being outside these bands isn't automatically a problem.
| Segment | Monthly customer churn | Annual customer churn |
|---|---|---|
| B2C SaaS / Consumer subscription | 3% – 7% | 30% – 60% |
| SMB SaaS | 3% – 5% | 25% – 50% |
| Mid-Market SaaS | 1% – 2% | 10% – 20% |
| Enterprise SaaS | 0.5% – 1% | 5% – 10% |
| Best-in-class SaaS (net revenue) | Net revenue churn between -2% and -10% annual | |
Source ranges synthesized from publicly available SaaS benchmark reports (OpenView, SaaS Capital, ProfitWell). Best-in-class net revenue churn is the band most public SaaS companies in the top decile report at investor day.
FAQ
What's the difference between gross and net revenue churn?
Gross revenue churn measures only what you lost: cancellations plus downgrades, divided by revenue at the start. Net revenue churn subtracts expansion (upgrades, seat additions, add-ons from existing customers) before dividing. Net can go negative when expansion exceeds losses, which is the holy grail of SaaS: your existing customer base grows revenue without acquiring anyone new.
Should I measure monthly or annual churn?
Match the natural billing cycle. B2C subscriptions and SMB SaaS billed monthly should report monthly churn. Annual-contract enterprise software reports annual. The trap is converting between them: 5% monthly churn is not 60% annual, it's 46% (because each month churns from a smaller base). Use the annualized formula or report whichever period your contracts actually use.
What counts as a churned customer if they downgrade?
For customer churn, no: a downgrade is still a paying customer, so they don't count as churned. For gross revenue churn, yes: the lost revenue from the downgrade counts. This is exactly why customer and revenue churn diverge. If high-value customers are downgrading rather than cancelling, your customer churn looks fine while revenue churn quietly bleeds.
Is 5% monthly churn bad?
It depends on segment. For B2C subscriptions, 5% monthly is normal. For SMB SaaS it's the upper edge of acceptable; healthy SMB businesses run 3 to 5%. For mid-market it's high (target 1 to 2%) and for enterprise it's a red flag (under 1% monthly, or about 5 to 10% annual). The deeper question: is the trend up or down quarter over quarter?
How do I reduce churn?
Tactically: better onboarding (first 14 days predict 90-day retention), proactive outreach to accounts with declining usage, and capturing cancel reasons systematically. Strategically: target customer segments with the lowest natural churn, even at higher CAC. Setting retention as a tracked goal in goals and OKRs tooling, with weekly check-ins, beats quarterly post-mortems every time. A churn improvement of 1 percentage point compounds harder than a 30% CAC reduction, because retention extends every cohort below it.
More background on retention math and reporting cadence lives in the clariBI knowledge base, including worked examples from real customer cohorts.
Track churn automatically in clariBI
Connect Stripe, HubSpot, your CRM, your billing system. clariBI computes customer churn, gross revenue churn, and net revenue churn every day, breaks the trend down by plan and segment, and uses AI-powered pattern detection to flag shifts before they show up in the board deck. Ask follow-ups in plain English via conversational analytics; no spreadsheets to maintain. See the pricing page for plan details.