Metrics · Retention / Return

Monthly Churn Rate

Percentage of paying subscribers who cancel in a given month. The inverse of retention. Monthly churn below 2% is world-class for SaaS; 2-5% is acceptable; above 5% is high-churn and unsustainable. Annual contracts effectively force 0% monthly churn during the contract period, making annual cohort churn (20-30% per year) a more meaningful benchmark for enterprise SaaS.

Direction
Lower is better ↓
Unit
percent
Top quartile
≤ 1.8%
Bottom quartile
> 5.5%

How to calculate it

(churned_subscribers_this_month / subscribers_at_start_of_month) × 100

Lower is better. Revenue churn ($ lost) is often more important than subscriber churn (headcount) — a high-ACV enterprise customer churning matters more than 10 SMB plan customers. Mixpanel segmentation by plan tier is essential for benchmarking churn accurately.

Per-industry distribution (3)

Each row shows the cited p25 / p50 / p75 for Monthly Churn Rate in that industry. Click an industry to open the full benchmark page.

Swipe horizontally to see the study name and source details.

Primary source

Product Benchmarks Report (2024) · Mixpanel · 2024

Cohort-based analysis of 8,000 SaaS products using Mixpanel's analytics platform, covering 16 million+ daily active users. Computes activation rates, trial-to-paid conversion (separately for opt-in vs opt-out trials), 7-day and 30-day return rates, and monthly churn by product category. Uses median + quartile distribution rather than mean to reduce skew from enterprise outliers.

Related metrics

7-Day Return RateLTV:CAC Ratio