Churn Rate Calculator
Churn is the leak in the bucket: the share of customers you lose per period. Compute it, see the retention flip side, the implied customer lifetime — and what a monthly rate compounds to over a year.
How to use this calculator
- Enter customers at the start of the period and how many were lost during it.
- Exclude new customers added during the period from both numbers.
- Pick monthly or annual — monthly view includes the compounding annual figure.
Formula used
Keep new acquisitions out of the calculation — churn measures the leak, growth measures the tap. Monthly churn compounds: 3.5%/month is not 42%/year but 1 − 0.965¹² ≈ 34.8%. Revenue churn (MRR lost) can differ from customer churn when big accounts leave.
Example calculation
42 of 1,200 customers lost in a month: churn = 3.5%, retention 96.5%, implied lifetime ≈ 28.6 months.
Compounded over a year that's 34.8% — of 1,000 customers today, only ~652 remain in 12 months without intervention.
Why churn dominates growth math
Churn caps growth invisibly: acquiring 5% new customers monthly while churning 3.5% nets 1.5% growth and a treadmill that speeds up with scale — the bigger you get, the more absolute customers each month's churn destroys. This is why retention improvements are worth multiples of equivalent acquisition wins: cutting churn from 3.5% to 2.5% extends average lifetime from 29 to 40 months, raising CLV ~40% across the entire base.
Watch cohorts, not just the blended rate: churn typically front-loads (early customers leave fastest), so a blended number mixes brand-new shaky cohorts with loyal veterans.
Why use this calculator?
- See the annualized truth behind an innocent-looking monthly rate.
- Get implied customer lifetime — the input CLV depends on.
- Track retention as the flip-side KPI teams can rally around.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good churn rate?
SMB-focused SaaS often runs 3–7% monthly; enterprise SaaS aims under 1% monthly (~10% annually); consumer subscriptions vary widely. Whatever the market, the direction of travel matters most.
Customer churn vs revenue churn — which matters?
Both: customer churn counts logos, revenue churn counts money. Losing many small accounts and one giant account can produce identical customer churn but very different revenue churn. Best-in-class SaaS reaches negative revenue churn — expansions outgrow losses.
How do I reduce churn?
Diagnose when and why people leave: onboarding gaps (churn in month 1–2), value gaps (usage decay before cancellation), or billing failures (involuntary churn, often 20–40% of the total and fixable with payment retries). Exit surveys and usage data beat guessing.