What Is a Good Churn Rate for SaaS?

What is a good churn rate for SaaS?

There is no single good churn rate for SaaS. A churn rate that is excellent for a $15-per-month consumer app would be alarming for software sold on six-figure annual contracts. The most reliable way to answer "what is a good churn rate for SaaS" is to compare yourself with businesses that sell at a similar price, to a similar customer, on similar contract terms, and to compare revenue churn with revenue benchmarks and customer churn with customer benchmarks.

This guide collects benchmarks from published research, explains what each one actually measures, and shows how to translate them into the monthly numbers most founders track. Every figure below comes from the cited source; where sources disagree or define things differently, that is noted rather than smoothed over.

Before comparing, make sure your own churn is calculated consistently. The churn rate calculation guide covers customer churn, gross revenue churn, and net revenue churn, and the SaaS churn and retention calculator will compute them from your inputs.

Read the benchmark's definition first

Published churn and retention benchmarks differ on four dimensions, and mixing them produces nonsense:

Customers or revenue. Logo churn counts accounts. Gross revenue retention (GRR) and net revenue retention (NRR) measure money.
Monthly or annual. An annual figure is not 12 times a monthly one, because churn compounds.
Median or top quartile. A top-quartile figure describes the best quarter of a sample, not a typical business.
Who is in the sample. A survey of B2B companies above $1 million ARR says little about a $3,000-MRR indie product, and a network of consumer subscription merchants says little about enterprise software.

A useful conversion when a benchmark is annual and your metric is monthly, assuming churn is spread evenly through the year:

Monthly churn ≈ 1 − (annual retention)^(1/12)

For example, 90% annual gross revenue retention is roughly 1 − 0.90^(1/12) ≈ 0.87% monthly gross revenue churn. The conversions in this guide use this formula; they are approximations, not figures published by the sources.

Benchmark 1: B2B SaaS revenue retention by contract value

SaaS Capital surveys private B2B SaaS companies each year. Its 2025 retention research brief, based on its 14th annual survey with more than 1,000 respondents, reports:

median NRR of 101% and median GRR of 91% across all companies;
median GRR of 95% for companies with annual contract values (ACVs) above $250,000, versus roughly 91% below $250,000;
median NRR of 98% for ACVs under $12,000, rising to 106% above $250,000;
bootstrapped companies at 104% NRR and 92% GRR, and equity-backed companies at 101% NRR and 90% GRR;
month-to-month contracts at 100% NRR and 89% GRR, annual contracts at 101% and 90%, and multi-year contracts at 103% and 94%.

The brief's charts exclude companies with less than $1 million of ARR. SaaS Capital calls GRR a "table stakes" benchmark and says that to have a shot at performance parity with peers, GRR must be at least 90%. Its web summary of the research adds that for ACVs of $25,000 to $50,000, median NRR is 102%, with a top quartile of 111% and a bottom quartile of 97%.

Translated into monthly terms with the formula above, 91% annual GRR is about 0.78% monthly gross revenue churn, and 95% annual GRR is about 0.43%. Those are low numbers, and they reflect a sample of established B2B companies, many with annual or multi-year contracts.

SaaS Capital also explains why price matters: higher-priced products tend to involve longer sales cycles, deeper implementation, and dedicated account management, which make them stickier. It argues that benchmarking by ACV is the best starting point for retention because companies with similar selling prices are organized, sell, and support customers similarly.

Benchmark 2: retention by average revenue per account

ChartMogul's SaaS Retention Report, published in November 2023 from anonymized data of more than 2,100 SaaS businesses for calendar 2022, segments by average revenue per account (ARPA). Its findings show how strongly retention depends on price point:

for businesses with ARPA under $10 per month, top-quartile customer retention was 63.1% and top-quartile NRR was 65.1%; only 2.7% of these businesses had NRR above 100%;
for businesses with ARPA over $500 per month, top-quartile customer retention was 85.7%, top-quartile NRR was 109.3%, and 41.1% had NRR above 100%;
top-quartile GRR was in the 60% to 70% range for ARPA under $50 per month, versus above 90% for ARPA over $500;
the report suggests best-in-class GRR of about 95% for mid-market and enterprise, and about 75% to 80% for B2C.

Note that these are mostly top-quartile figures, not medians. A top-quartile low-ARPA business keeping 63% of its customers over a year is losing roughly 1 − 0.631^(1/12) ≈ 3.8% of customers per month. For a typical, not top-quartile, low-priced product, monthly logo churn can be higher still.

ChartMogul's SaaS metrics cheat sheet also cites a December 2025 ChartMogul analysis putting median NRR for B2B SaaS at 82% with a top quartile of 97%, and median NRR for consumer and AI-native products at around 48% to 49%. That B2B median is much lower than SaaS Capital's 101%. The likely reason is the population: ChartMogul's customers include many small, self-serve companies that SaaS Capital's charts exclude. Neither figure is wrong; they describe different businesses.

Benchmark 3: subscriber churn across subscription businesses

Recurly publishes subscriber churn data from merchants on its billing network on its churn rate benchmarks page, broken down by industry, by average revenue per customer, and into voluntary and involuntary churn.

We do not quote its specific percentages here. As of October 2026 the page labels its figures as annual churn, but the values are low relative to the retention benchmarks above, and the page gives conflicting numbers for the same segment in different passages. Read the current page and its definitions directly before relying on any one figure.

The directional patterns are consistent across its breakdowns and still useful: higher-priced subscriptions tend to churn less, and involuntary churn from failed payments is a much larger share of total churn at low price points than at high ones. Remember that these are subscriber counts, not revenue.

Why segments differ so much

The gap between a consumer app and an enterprise product is not a matter of execution alone. Several structural forces push churn up or down:

Price and buyer. A low monthly price is easy to start and easy to cancel, often on a whim. A purchase that needed a budget and several approvals is rarely reversed quickly.
Contract length. Annual and multi-year contracts can only churn at renewal. SaaS Capital's data shows slightly better retention for longer contracts.
Switching costs. Products embedded in workflows, integrations, or data storage are harder to replace.
Expansion headroom. Seat-based and usage-based B2B products can grow inside an account; most consumer plans cannot. ChartMogul attributes low NRR at low ARPA to higher churn and fewer upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Payment method. Card-based consumer billing produces more failed payments; invoiced B2B customers fail less often, consistent with the pattern in Recurly's price-band data.
Company age. Young products often have weak early-cohort retention that improves as positioning sharpens.

A practical way to judge your own churn

Calculate gross revenue churn and logo churn separately for the last 6 to 12 months, using the same formula each month.
Choose the closest benchmark by price point and customer type, not by "SaaS" in general. A $29-per-month product for freelancers should look at low-ARPA data, not at SaaS Capital's enterprise bands.
Convert periods correctly with the compounding formula before comparing.
Look at cohorts. If churn is concentrated in the first two or three months, the issue is likely onboarding or fit. If older cohorts are churning, look at value delivered over time or competition.
Split voluntary and involuntary churn. Involuntary churn is often the cheapest to fix.
Watch the trend. A churn rate moving from 6% to 4% monthly may matter more than whether 4% is "good."

Then check whether growth outruns churn using the SaaS quick ratio, and examine expansion through net revenue retention.

How buyers use churn benchmarks

In an acquisition, churn affects both the forecast and the multiple. A buyer will rebuild churn from customer-level data rather than accept a summary figure, and will compare it with businesses at a similar price point. The SaaS valuation calculator lets you see how retention assumptions change a valuation range, and the startup buyer due diligence guide explains how churn is tested.

RevenueBug profiles show trailing 30-day revenue calculated from connected payment-provider data, which helps a buyer see revenue trends over time. That figure is not a churn calculation and not subscription MRR; the methodology explains what it covers. Churn still needs to be computed from subscription and customer records.

Frequently asked questions

What is a good monthly churn rate for B2B SaaS?

It depends on contract value. Established B2B companies in SaaS Capital's 2025 survey had median annual gross revenue retention of about 91%, which works out to under 1% monthly revenue churn. Low-priced, self-serve B2B products typically churn more than that.

What is a good churn rate for B2C or low-priced subscriptions?

Expect materially higher churn than B2B. ChartMogul's 2023 report found that even top-quartile businesses with ARPA under $10 per month retained about 63% of customers over a year, roughly 3.8% monthly logo churn.

Should I compare customer churn or revenue churn with benchmarks?

Compare like with like. SaaS Capital publishes revenue retention; Recurly publishes subscriber churn; ChartMogul publishes both. Do not compare your logo churn with a GRR benchmark.

Why do different benchmark sources disagree?

They survey different populations (company size, price point, B2B versus B2C), use different definitions, and report medians or quartiles. Use the source whose sample most resembles your business.

Is negative churn realistic for a small SaaS company?

It is uncommon at low price points. ChartMogul found only 2.7% of businesses with ARPA under $10 per month had NRR above 100%, compared with 41.1% above $500 per month.

How much does involuntary churn matter?

Recurly's data shows involuntary churn is a meaningful share of total churn at lower price points and very small at high price points. Payment retries and card updates are worth reviewing first.