Report: Customer Churn Rate
This report is called Paid Subscriber Churn Rate for accounts with free subscription support. Learn more.
The Customer Churn Rate report tracks the percentage of customers who cancel or don’t renew their subscriptions over time. For SaaS businesses, it’s one of the most important signals of product-market fit—helping you spot retention problems early and take action before they affect your bottom line.
High churn erodes recurring revenue, inflates customer acquisition costs, and signals product-market fit problems. The lower your churn rate, the more predictable your growth.
What is a good customer churn rate?
Ideally, your customer churn rate is as low as possible. Even a seemingly low monthly churn rate of, e.g., 5% corresponds to an annual loss of nearly half (46%) of existing customers.
Our data shows that lower average revenue per account (ARPA) correlates with higher churn. Businesses with less than $10 ARPA typically see 6–7% monthly churn. Businesses with $500 ARPA or more typically see 1–2% monthly churn.
What to Know About This Report
- Familiarize yourself with the churn recognition setting in ChartMogul and make sure it’s configured to support your needs.
- Review how ChartMogul handles contraction and churn in the lifecycle of a subscription.
- This report tracks the number of customers whose status has changed to Cancelled Subscriber. Customers who have multiple subscriptions and cancel one, but not all of their subscriptions, are still classified as Active Subscribers and, therefore, their cancellations are classified as Contraction. Learn more about customer statuses.
- Toggle between the default (WoW/MoM/QoQ) and year-over-year (YoY) rates. Learn more.
Free subscriptions
On October 2, 2025, we introduced a new “trial” line item type and enabled support for zero-value subscription line items. We’re gradually making the functionality available to all accounts. If you have this feature enabled:
- Customer Churn Rate is renamed to Paid Subscriber Churn Rate and only shows the churn of paid subscribers.
- A new report, All Subscriber Churn Rate, allows you to track the churn of both free and paid subscribers.
How ChartMogul Calculates Customer Churn Rate
On August 15, 2022 we retired the Churn Rate Formula setting. Accounts opened prior to this date that had selected the Shopify formula can continue to configure this setting. All other accounts, including new accounts opened on or after August 15, 2022 use the standard formula.
Standard Formula (B2B)
Formula
Example
At the start of the month, you have 100 customers. During the month, 12 customers churn. Of those who churn, one reactivates, and one had joined during the period. Your customer churn rate is 10%: (12 − 2) ÷ 100.
Shopify Formula (B2C)
Formula
ChartMogul excludes customers you gain that day and customers who both churn and reactivate on the same day from the calculation.
Example
At the start of Monday, you have 100 active customers. That day, you lose five customers. The next day, you gain ten but lose five customers, leaving you with 100 customers at the end of Tuesday. ChartMogul excludes the new customers gained on Tuesday from the calculation and produces a customer count of 90.
The customer churn rate for this period (Monday – Tuesday) is the sum of each day’s churn: 10.26%:
- Monday’s customer churn rate: (100 − 95) ÷ 100 = 5%
- Tuesday’s customer churn rate: (95 − 90) ÷ 95 = 5.26%
Churn rate for the current period
When calculating churn rate for a period that hasn’t ended yet, ChartMogul uses the following formula to estimate churn rate at the end of the period:
(total number of days in the period ÷ number of days passed in the period) × real churn rate
How to Read the Report Data Table
The Report Data table — the detailed data grid below the main report — works differently for Customer Churn Rate than for other reports. It breaks down your churn into the following categories:
- Starting Customers — The number of subscribers who were active at the start of the report interval.
- Churned Subscribers — The number of subscribers who churned during the report interval and were still canceled at the end of the period.
- Subscribed & Churned — The number of subscribers who subscribed and churned within the report interval. This is shown for informational purposes only, as it doesn’t impact the metric.
- Churned & Reactivated — The number of subscribers who churned and reactivated within the report interval. This is shown for informational purposes only, as it doesn’t impact the metric.
- Customer Churn Rate — The percentage of subscribers who have canceled all of their subscriptions in the report interval.
- Change — The increase or decrease in Customer Churn Rate from the previous report interval, shown as a percentage.
Next Steps
- Learn more about our other churn rate reports.
- See which customers are scheduled to churn with CMRR.
- Read more on our blog: What Is a Good Customer Churn Rate?