Churn Rate Calculator

Customer (logo) churn = Customers lost ÷ Customers at start × 100. Revenue churn = MRR lost ÷ MRR at start × 100. Net revenue churn = (MRR lost − Expansion MRR) ÷ MRR at start. Retention = 1 − churn. Customer lifetime = 1 ÷ churn. Annual churn = 1 − (1 − monthly churn)¹² (compounded — not monthly × 12).

Three kinds of churn

Churn comes in three flavours, and conflating them causes endless confusion. Customer (logo) churn counts accounts: the number of customers who left, over the number you started with. Gross revenue churn counts money: the MRR lost to cancellations and downgrades, over the starting MRR — and it usually differs from logo churn, because the customers who leave are rarely average-sized. Net revenue churn goes one step further and subtracts expansion (upgrades and seat growth from the customers who stayed) from the revenue lost. When expansion outweighs what churned, net revenue churn turns negative — the famous “negative churn,” where a cohort’s revenue grows over time even with no new sales. The calculator shows all three side by side so you can see, for instance, a healthy −2% net churn sitting behind a 6% gross churn.

Worked example — 1,000 customers, 50 lost; MRR 100,000, 6,000 lost, 8,000 expansion: Logo churn = 50 ÷ 1,000 = 5%. Gross revenue churn = 6,000 ÷ 100,000 = 6%. Net revenue churn = (6,000 − 8,000) ÷ 100,000 = −2% → NRR 102%.

Churn, retention and lifetime

Three numbers fall straight out of churn. Retention is simply 1 − churn — the share that stays. Implied customer lifetime is 1 ÷ churn: at 5% monthly churn the average customer stays 20 months, and this is the explicit bridge to customer lifetime value, since CLV multiplies the per-period margin by exactly this lifetime. And net revenue retention (NRR) is 1 − net revenue churn, the single most-watched SaaS health metric — above 100% means the existing base compounds on its own, which is what lets the best subscription businesses grow efficiently. Because of the 1 ÷ churn relationship, small changes in churn move lifetime and value enormously: halving churn doubles the lifetime. That non-linearity is why retention work so often beats acquisition work dollar for dollar.

The monthly-to-annual trap

The most common churn arithmetic error is converting monthly churn to annual by multiplying by twelve. That overstates it, because churn compounds on a shrinking base — once some customers have left, next month’s churn applies to fewer remaining customers. The correct conversion is annual churn = 1 − (1 − monthly churn)¹². At 5% monthly churn, the naïve method gives 60%, but the true annual churn is about 46% — a 14-point difference that matters enormously for forecasting. The reverse holds too: annual churn converts to monthly as 1 − (1 − annual churn)^(1/12), not annual ÷ 12. The conversion table here lays the compounded figures next to the naïve ones so the gap is obvious. Educational tool only, not investment advice.