Churn Rate Calculator
Calculate SaaS customer churn, revenue (MRR) churn, or annualized churn rate from a monthly rate. Built specifically for subscription businesses, with sourced retention benchmarks.
Churn Rate = (Customers Lost ÷ Customers at Start) × 100Adjust Variables
Interactive Step-by-Step Calculation Proofs
View how variables resolve algebraically down to peer-reviewed standard outputs.
Why Use This Calculator
Tracking employee turnover instead of customer loss? Use the attrition rate calculator — this page is built specifically for subscription and SaaS customer and revenue churn. Churn rate measures the percentage of customers or recurring revenue a SaaS business loses over a given period, and it's one of the most closely watched metrics in the category, since acquiring a new customer typically costs far more than retaining an existing one. Customer churn rate (logo churn) is calculated as (Customers Lost ÷ Customers at Start of Period) × 100. But logo count alone can be misleading for SaaS specifically — losing ten small self-serve accounts is very different from losing one enterprise contract — which is why SaaS finance teams also track revenue churn (MRR churn): the percentage of monthly recurring revenue lost, calculated the same way but using dollars instead of logo counts. Because churn is normally measured monthly but board decks and investors usually want an annual figure, this calculator also converts a monthly rate to an annualized churn rate using compounding — not simple multiplication by 12, which understates the true annual impact.
Mathematical Formula Explanation
Calculated standard benchmarks are based on direct functional dependencies. The primary calculation logic follows this formula:
Churn Rate = (Customers Lost ÷ Customers at Start of Period) × 100Customer Churn Rate and Revenue Churn Rate apply the identical division — something lost ÷ something at the start of the period — to two different units: customer count for the first, monthly recurring revenue dollars for the second. Annualized Churn Rate is a different kind of calculation: instead of a single-period ratio, it compounds a steady monthly rate forward across 12 periods, which is why it can't be produced by simply multiplying the monthly rate by 12.
Worked Examples (Step-by-Step)
These examples show customer churn and revenue (MRR) churn calculated from a single month's SaaS numbers, and a steady monthly rate converted to its annualized equivalent.
Example 1: Monthly Customer Churn
“A subscription business starts the month with 1,000 active customers and loses 50 to cancellations. What is the customer churn rate?”
- CUSTOMERSLOSTCHURN: 50
- CUSTOMERSATSTARTCHURN: 1,000
- CHURNRATECUSTOMER: 5
- CUSTOMERSRETAINEDCHURN: 950
- RETENTIONRATECHURN: 95
Example 2: Revenue (MRR) Churn
“A SaaS company starts the month with $100,000 in MRR and loses $5,000 in MRR to cancellations and downgrades. What is the revenue churn rate?”
- MRRLOST: 5,000
- MRRATSTART: 100,000
- REVENUECHURNRATE: 5
- MRRRETAINED: 95,000
Example 3: Annualizing a Monthly Churn Rate
“A business has a steady 5% monthly churn rate. What does that work out to as an annual churn rate?”
- MONTHLYCHURNPCT: 5
- ANNUALIZEDCHURNRATE: 45.96
- ANNUALRETENTIONRATE: 54.04
SaaS Customer Retention Benchmarks
| Segment | Benchmark | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Best-in-class B2B SaaS (overall) | ~90% annual retention (~10% annual churn) | Top-performing cohort across ChartMogul's aggregated customer base.ChartMogul: SaaS Retention Report |
| Low ARPA (under $25/month) | ~75% annual retention (~25% annual churn) | Smaller, more price-sensitive accounts churn substantially faster than higher-value accounts. |
| High ARPA (over $1,000/month) | ~91.9% annual retention (~8.1% annual churn) | Enterprise-value accounts retain far better than self-serve/SMB accounts. |
Common Mistakes & Edge Cases
- Reporting only logo churn without revenue churnA SaaS business that loses many small accounts but retains its largest customers can show alarming customer churn while revenue churn stays low — or the reverse, losing a handful of enterprise accounts while logo churn looks fine. Reporting either number alone misrepresents business health; SaaS finance teams track both together.
- Comparing churn across ARPA segments as if they were one marketLow-ARPA self-serve accounts and high-ARPA enterprise accounts churn at very different baseline rates — roughly 25% vs. 8% annually per the benchmark table above. Blending both into one company-wide churn number can hide which segment is actually the problem.
- Ignoring expansion revenue when judging revenue churn aloneA business can have real revenue churn from cancellations and downgrades but still grow overall MRR if expansion revenue from existing accounts (upsells, seat growth) more than offsets it — the combined picture is net revenue retention. Looking at churn in isolation can make a genuinely healthy, growing SaaS business look like it's struggling.