Customer retention rate calculator
Enter how many customers you had at the start of a period, how many new ones you won and how many you have at the end. Get your retention rate, churn rate, customers lost and what the same rate does to your base over 12 periods. Extra panels cover revenue retention, repeat purchases and cohorts. Free, no sign-up, nothing leaves your browser.
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The formulas
How to calculate customer retention rate
Customer retention rate (CRR) is the share of the customers you had at the start of a period who are still customers at the end. New customers are taken out first, because they were not there to lose.
The result is only as good as the counts. Use paying customers, count each customer once even if they have several subscriptions or locations, and take all three numbers from the same system on the same dates.
A customer who left and came back within the period is easiest to treat as new, so they do not push retention above what you really kept. The calculator refuses a result above 100%, because you cannot keep more of your starting customers than you had.
The lifetime figure assumes the churn rate stays the same. At 5% churn a month, the average customer stays about 20 months. Treat it as a rough guide for LTV, not as a promise.
Revenue retention, repeat purchases and cohorts
Customer retention counts heads. Gross revenue retention (GRR) weighs each customer by what they pay, so losing one large account hurts more than losing ten small ones. GRR can never go above 100%; net revenue retention (NRR) adds upgrades and can.
Shops without subscriptions rarely know who has churned, because customers simply stop ordering. The repeat purchase rate is the practical substitute: what share of your buyers came back at least once. A cohort table follows one group over time and shows where most of them drop off.
The 12-period projection
The projection repeats this period's retention rate and shows how many of today's customers would still be with you. Without new sales, 95% a month leaves about 54% of the base after a year. It is an illustration of compounding, not a forecast.
95%
(1,070 − 120) ÷ 1,000 = 95%
950 of the 1,000 starting customers stayed for the month.
5% a month
100% − 95% = 5%
50 customers left. At that rate the average customer stays about 20 months.
54%
0.9512 = 0.54
Only 540 of the starting 1,000 would still be customers a year later without new sales.
Interpretation
How to read your result
The retention rate tells you how leaky the base is. The other numbers tell you what that leak costs over time.
Retention rate and churn
They are two sides of one number. A month with 95% retention loses 5% of its starting customers. Look at several periods in a row: one big cancellation or a clean-up of inactive accounts can make a single month look worse than the trend.
Net customer growth
Net growth compares the end with the start, new customers included. You can grow while retention falls, as long as sales outpace losses. That works until acquisition gets more expensive, so read growth and retention together.
The retention curve
The chart compounds your rate over 12 periods. The bars fall fast at first and then flatten, because each period loses a share of a smaller base. If you see the cohort table flatten earlier than this curve, your newest customers churn most and onboarding is the place to look.
Lifetime and half-life
Average lifetime is 1 ÷ churn. Half-life is how many periods it takes until half of today's customers are gone. Both are handy for LTV and for explaining churn to people who do not like percentages.
Where CRMsoftware.pro helps
Many cancellations start with a slow answer or a forgotten follow-up. CRMsoftware.pro answers on your website and messengers with an AI agent and keeps every conversation on the customer's record. See what is included on the features page.
Worked example
One month of customer retention, step by step
A subscription business starts October with 1,000 paying customers. During the month it signs 120 new customers and ends the month with 1,070.
The steps below match the calculator's default numbers, so you can follow them and then change any input.
1. Customers kept: 1,070 − 120 = 950
2. Retention rate: 950 ÷ 1,000 × 100 = 95%
3. Churn rate: 100% − 95% = 5%
4. Customers lost: 1,000 − 950 = 50
5. Net customer growth: 1,070 − 1,000 = +70 (+7%)
6. Average lifetime: 1 ÷ 0.05 = 20 months
7. Retention over 12 months: 0.9512 = 54%
8. Half-life: log 0.5 ÷ log 0.95 = 13.5 months
Growth looks healthy at +7%, but 50 customers walked out. If nothing changed, the business would need to keep winning 50 customers a month just to stand still.
| Month | Share of starting customers left | Customers left |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 95% | 950 |
| 3 | 85.7% | 857 |
| 6 | 73.5% | 735 |
| 12 | 54% | 540 |
The extra panels use the same company. Its 1,000 customers paid $50,000 of monthly recurring revenue; cancellations removed $2,000 and downgrades $500, while upgrades added $1,500.
9. GRR: (50,000 − 2,000 − 500) ÷ 50,000 = 95%
10. NRR: (50,000 − 2,500 + 1,500) ÷ 50,000 = 98%
11. Repeat purchase rate (a separate online shop): 1,120 ÷ 4,000 = 28%
12. Cohort of 500: 410 → 360 → 330 → 310 → 295 → 285, so 57% are left after 6 months
Press Show example in the calculator to load these numbers and change any of them.
Benchmarks
What good retention looks like
Only figures we could check at the original source on November 6, 2026. Retention differs so much by industry and price point that a single “good” number does not exist; your own trend matters most.
Why a few points of retention matter
Harvard Business Review cites research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company: increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. Reichheld's own Bain brief gives a narrower example from financial services, where a 5% increase in retention produced more than a 25% increase in profit. The same HBR article says acquiring a new customer is five to 25 times more expensive than retaining one.
SaaS: about 91% of revenue kept per year
SaaS Capital's 2025 survey of more than 1,000 private B2B SaaS companies found a median gross revenue retention of 91% and net revenue retention of 101%. Companies with contracts above $250,000 a year kept a median 95% of revenue. These are revenue figures, so compare them with the GRR panel, not with customer counts.
Convert before you compare
A yearly benchmark and a monthly result are not the same thing. 91% a year is about 99.2% a month, or roughly 0.8% lost each month, if losses were spread evenly. Switch the period to Year when you compare with yearly figures, or convert with (monthly rate)12.
Use benchmarks as a direction, not a target
Customers on cheap monthly plans churn far more than customers on annual contracts, and shops measure loyalty with repeat purchases, not subscriptions. Compare yourself with businesses of your size and model, and above all with your own last six periods.
Avoid these
Common retention mistakes
Most wrong retention numbers come from counting the wrong customers. Check these before you report the figure.
Leaving new customers in
Dividing customers at the end by customers at the start mixes retention with sales. With 120 new customers, 1,070 ÷ 1,000 looks like 107% retention when the real figure is 95%. Always subtract new customers first.
Comparing different period lengths
A 95% monthly rate is about 54% over a year. Comparing a monthly figure with an annual benchmark, or a quarter with a month, makes you look far better or far worse than you are.
Counting reactivated customers as kept
A customer who cancelled in March and came back in May was lost and won again. Count them as new in the period they return, otherwise retention can exceed 100%.
Counting accounts, users and seats in one number
Decide whether a customer is a company, a paying account or a person, and stick to it. Mixing them changes the result every time a client adds or removes a user.
Reading customer retention as revenue retention
Keeping 95% of customers can still mean losing 15% of revenue if the ones who left were your biggest. Check the GRR panel next to the customer rate.
FAQ
Customer retention questions
What is customer retention rate?
Customer retention rate is the share of the customers you had at the start of a period who are still customers at the end. It ignores customers won during the period. A 95% monthly rate means you kept 95 of every 100 customers you started the month with.
How do you calculate customer retention rate?
Subtract new customers from customers at the end of the period, divide by customers at the start and multiply by 100. With 1,000 at the start, 120 new and 1,070 at the end: (1,070 − 120) ÷ 1,000 × 100 = 95%.
What is the difference between retention rate and churn rate?
They add up to 100%. Retention is the share of starting customers you kept; churn is the share you lost. 95% retention means 5% churn for the same period.
What is a good customer retention rate?
It depends on industry, price and contract length. For revenue, SaaS Capital's 2025 survey of private B2B SaaS companies found a median yearly gross revenue retention of 91%. For customer counts there is no reliable cross-industry figure, so compare yourself with your own past periods.
How do I turn a monthly retention rate into a yearly one?
Raise the monthly rate to the 12th power. 95% a month is 0.95¹² ≈ 54% a year, not 40%. The calculator shows the yearly equivalent when you choose Month or Quarter.
Does the calculator store my data?
No. Everything runs in your browser. The share link keeps your numbers in the address after the # sign, which is not sent to our server.
References
Sources
- Retention and profit (5% → 25% to 95%) and the cost of a new customer: Amy Gallo, Harvard Business Review, "The Value of Keeping the Right Customers", October 29, 2014
- Financial services example (5% more retention, more than 25% more profit): Frederick Reichheld, Bain & Company, "Prescription for cutting costs: Loyal relationships" (PDF), 2001
- Median gross and net revenue retention: SaaS Capital, "2025 B2B SaaS Retention Benchmarks" (PDF), and "What is a Good Retention Rate for a Private SaaS Company in 2025?", September 18, 2025
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