Churn Rate Calculator
Calculate customer churn rate, retention rate, and projected annual churn from your subscriber data. Understand your SaaS retention at a glance.
Quick Answer
Churn Rate = (Customers Lost / Customers at Start) x 100. If you started with 500 customers and lost 25, your churn rate is 5%. Retention rate is the inverse: 95%.
Calculate Churn Rate
Enter the number of customers at the start of the period and how many you lost.
About This Tool
The Churn Rate Calculator helps SaaS founders, product managers, and investors quickly determine customer churn rate, retention rate, and projected annual churn from basic subscriber data. Customer churn is arguably the single most important metric for subscription businesses because it determines the fundamental sustainability of your revenue model.
Understanding Churn Rate
Churn rate measures the percentage of customers who leave your product during a specific time period. The formula is straightforward: divide the number of customers lost by the number of customers at the start of the period, then multiply by 100. While the calculation is simple, the implications are profound. A SaaS company with 5% monthly churn will lose nearly half its customer base within a year (46.4% when compounded). This means the company must acquire enough new customers each year to replace nearly half its existing base before it can grow. This is the churn treadmill that destroys many subscription businesses.
Monthly vs. Annual Churn
A common mistake is multiplying monthly churn by 12 to get annual churn. This is incorrect because churn compounds: each month, the churn rate applies to a smaller base. The correct conversion is: Annual Churn = 1 - (1 - Monthly Churn)^12. With 5% monthly churn, the annual rate is 46.4%, not 60%. This compounding effect works in both directions. At very low churn rates (below 1% monthly), the difference between simple multiplication and compounding is small, but at higher rates the gap becomes significant and can lead to materially wrong projections.
The Retention Rate Perspective
Retention rate is simply 100% minus the churn rate, but framing metrics in terms of retention rather than churn can shift organizational focus in a productive way. Teams that track retention naturally think about what keeps customers, while teams focused on churn tend to investigate why customers leave. Both perspectives are valuable, but the most successful SaaS companies tend to invest heavily in proactive retention strategies: strong onboarding, customer success programs, regular check-ins, and product improvements driven by usage data.
Customer Churn vs. Revenue Churn
This calculator measures customer (logo) churn, which treats every customer equally. Revenue churn, sometimes called MRR churn, weights each customer by how much they pay. A company might have 5% customer churn but only 2% revenue churn if the customers leaving are mostly on cheaper plans. Net revenue retention (NRR) goes further by including expansion revenue from existing customers. Best-in-class SaaS companies achieve NRR above 120%, meaning they grow revenue from existing customers faster than they lose it to churn, effectively making net revenue churn negative.
Benchmarks by Segment
Acceptable churn rates vary dramatically by business model. Enterprise SaaS with annual contracts typically sees less than 5-7% annual churn. Mid-market B2B SaaS averages 10-15% annual churn. SMB SaaS with monthly contracts often sees 3-7% monthly churn (30-60% annual). Consumer subscriptions (streaming, apps, newsletters) can see 5-15% monthly churn. The key insight is that churn benchmarks must be evaluated in context. A 3% monthly churn rate is excellent for a $9/month consumer app but concerning for a $50,000/year enterprise platform.