Churn rate calculator
Calculate monthly churn rate, monthly retention, and annualized churn from customers lost and customers at the start of the period.
What this calculator covers
Use this churn rate calculator to convert customers lost during a period into a monthly churn percentage and paired retention figure.
Annualized churn helps show how a seemingly modest monthly loss rate compounds across a full year when the same retention pattern repeats.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a healthy monthly churn rate for a SaaS business?
- Benchmarks vary widely by market segment, contract value, and business model, and they shift over time. As a rough reference, lower monthly churn is generally better — even a few percentage points monthly compounds to a significant annual loss. Consult current industry benchmark reports for segment-specific guidance rather than relying on a single figure.
- Why does annualized churn use compounding rather than just multiplying monthly churn by 12?
- Multiplying monthly churn by 12 would overstate annual loss because it ignores that the customer base shrinks each month. The compounding approach applies monthly retention repeatedly to the surviving base, which more accurately represents how a real cohort erodes over a full year.
- Does the calculator include new customers acquired during the month?
- No. It measures churn against the customers who existed at the start of the period only. New additions during the month are excluded because including them would dilute the churn signal and mix acquisition performance with retention performance.
- What is the relationship between churn rate and retention rate?
- They are complements: monthly retention equals 100% minus monthly churn. A 3% monthly churn means 97% of customers are retained that month. The calculator shows both so you can frame performance either as a loss rate or as a retention achievement depending on which framing is more useful.
Tool
Run the calculation
Result
RESULT · CHURN
â„–177
Primary result
7.50%
18 customers lost out of 240 starting customers produces 7.50% monthly churn and 60.76% annualized churn.
- Customers retained
- 222
- Monthly churn
- 7.50%
- Monthly retention
- 92.50%
- Annualized churn
- 60.76%
Step-by-step solution
- 1.Divide lost customers by starting customers to find monthly churn: 18 ÷ 240.
- 2.Convert the ratio to a percent to read monthly churn 7.50%.
- 3.Translate monthly churn into annualized churn using repeated monthly retention 92.50%.
Walkthrough
Visual walkthrough
Churn begins as a simple monthly loss ratio, then annualizes that loss pattern by compounding the surviving customer base across 12 months.
01
Measure customer loss for the month
18 ÷ 240
Monthly churn compares the customers lost during the period with the number of customers you had at the start.
02
Convert to a monthly churn rate
7.5%
The monthly percent is the direct period loss rate that most SaaS teams monitor operationally.
03
Annualize the loss pattern
Annualized churn compounds the monthly retention rate across a full year to show how destructive the same monthly loss rate becomes over time.
60.76% annualized churn