Churn Rate Calculator

Churn rate measures the percentage of customers (or revenue) you lose over a given period. It's the single most important metric for any subscription or SaaS business because it directly determines whether your company can grow sustainably or is stuck on a treadmill — acquiring new customers just to replace the ones walking out the back door.

The compounding effect of churn is what makes it so dangerous. A 5% monthly churn rate doesn't mean you lose 60% of customers per year — it means you lose 46%. That's because each month you're losing 5% of a shrinking base. At 10% monthly churn, you'd lose nearly 72% of your customers within a year. Even small improvements matter enormously when compounding works in your favor.

There are several types of churn to track: customer churn (also called logo churn), gross revenue churn, and net revenue churn. Each tells a different story about the health of your business, and understanding all three is essential for making the right retention decisions.

The basic churn rate formula is straightforward:

Customers Lost includes only customers who fully cancelled or did not renew during the period. It does not include downgrades (those belong in revenue churn) or customers who paused their subscription.

Customers at Start is your active customer count at the beginning of the period. Do not include new customers acquired during the period — only the cohort that existed at the start.

For example, if you started January with 2,000 customers and 80 cancelled by month end, your January churn rate is (80 / 2,000) × 100 = 4.0%.

A common mistake is multiplying monthly churn by 12 to get annual churn. That doesn't work because churn compounds — each month you're losing a percentage of a smaller base. The correct conversion formula accounts for this compounding:

To go the other direction — from annual to monthly — the formula is:

Here's a quick reference table showing how monthly churn compounds into annual churn:

Customer churn (also called logo churn) treats every customer equally — it's simply the percentage of customers who leave. Revenue churn weights each customer by how much they pay. These two numbers often tell very different stories.

Imagine you have 1,000 customers and lose 50 this month. Your customer churn is 5%. But if those 50 customers were all on your $29/month plan while your remaining customers average $200/month, your revenue churn is much lower — roughly 0.7%. Conversely, losing just one enterprise customer paying $50,000/month could mean 0.1% customer churn but devastating revenue churn.

For most businesses, revenue churn is the more important metric because it directly reflects the financial health of your business. Investors, in particular, focus on net revenue retention (the inverse of net revenue churn) as a key indicator of product-market fit and business quality.

That said, customer churn still matters. High customer churn — even if revenue churn is low — signals product or experience problems that will eventually catch up with you. Track both. Use the calculator above to compute each.

For detailed benchmarks by industry and company size, see our SaaS Churn Rate Benchmarks page.

Net negative churn is the holy grail of SaaS metrics. It happens when the revenue you gain from existing customers — through upgrades, cross-sells, seat additions, and usage growth — exceeds the revenue you lose from cancellations and downgrades.

When you achieve net negative churn, your existing customer base grows in value every month without acquiring a single new customer. This creates a powerful flywheel: new customer acquisition becomes pure upside rather than a replacement for lost revenue.

Companies like Slack, Twilio, Datadog, and Snowflake have famously achieved net negative churn. They share common strategies: usage-based pricing models, land-and-expand motions, strong network effects within organizations, and deliberate product-led expansion paths.

In the Net Revenue Churn tab of the calculator above, a negative result means you have net negative churn — your expansion revenue exceeds your losses. If you want to work toward this, our Product-Led Expansion experiment is a practical starting point.

These are rough monthly customer churn benchmarks for SaaS. Your ideal target varies significantly based on your industry, customer segment, pricing model, and contract structure. Enterprise SaaS with annual contracts should aim for under 1.5% monthly. B2C consumer subscriptions might be healthy at 5-6%.

For a detailed, filterable breakdown by industry, company size, pricing model, and B2B vs B2C, see our full SaaS Churn Rate Benchmarks page.