Churn Rate Calculator
Use our churn rate calculator to measure customer churn rate, retention rate, and annual churn. Learn how to calculate churn rate for SaaS, sales, and general business using simple churn rate calculation formulas and examples.
What is Churn Rate?
Churn rate is the percentage of customers (or subscribers) who stop using a product or service during a period. If you’re asking what is churn rate in business, it’s one of the clearest signals of retention and customer satisfaction.
In SaaS, churn rate is especially important because recurring revenue depends on keeping customers. That’s why teams track churn rate SaaS metrics alongside retention rate and customer lifetime value.
Attrition rate is often used as a synonym for churn (especially in HR or membership contexts). If you’re looking for what is attrition rate calculation, it’s typically the same concept: the percentage of people who leave over a period.
Churn Rate & Retention Formula
Churn rate calculation is usually based on how many customers you lost during the period compared to how many you started with. You can also compute churn from retention rate (since churn + retention ≈ 100%).
This is the most common churn calculation formula for customer churn rate.
Retention focuses on customers you kept, excluding new customers added during the period.
Useful if you already know retention and want to calculate churn rate from retention rate.
If you started with 1,000 customers and lost 40 in a month, your customer churn rate (attrition rate) is 4% for that month.
If you started with 1,000 customers, ended with 980, and added 30 new customers, your retention rate is 95% for the period.
If you want an annual churn estimate, you can compound monthly churn. This is helpful for SaaS churn rate reporting.
Where n is the number of periods per year (12 for monthly, 52 for weekly).
How to Use the Churn Rate Calculator
- 1
Enter your starting customers for the period.
- 2
Enter the number of customers lost (cancellations) during the period.
- 3
Optionally enter ending customers and new customers if you want retention rate too.
- 4
Click “Calculate” to see churn rate %, retention rate %, and customer lifetime estimate (if included).
Frequently Asked Questions
A common churn rate calculation is customers lost divided by starting customers, multiplied by 100.
If retention is calculated correctly for the same period, churn rate is approximately 100% minus retention rate.
Churn rate in SaaS is the percentage of subscribers who cancel in a given period. It’s often tracked monthly and compared against churn rate benchmarks for similar products.
In business and sales, churn rate measures the rate customers stop buying or cancel. High churn rate can signal product-market fit issues, poor onboarding, pricing problems, or weak customer success.
A good churn rate depends on industry, customer type, contract length, and growth stage. Compare your churn rate benchmarks against similar businesses and your own historical data.
Often, yes. Attrition rate is frequently used as a synonym for churn, especially in HR or membership contexts.
Use the same formula: if A2 is starting customers and B2 is customers lost, churn % can be =B2/A2. Format the cell as a percentage (or multiply by 100).