Benchmarks 101: Churn benchmarks

Optimize customer retention using Recurly's churn benchmarks. Isolate voluntary and involuntary churn to apply targeted payment recovery and retention fixes.

← Back to Scale

Upcoming: Bring your benchmark questions to a live session with our CSMs. Register now →

Scale • Benchmarks 101

Churn benchmarks

Three KPIs that reveal how and why you're losing subscribers — and which type of churn needs a different fix.

Navigation Menu

Navigate Home Path Overview 1 Reading benchmarks 2 Subscriber benchmarks

Churn benchmarks 4 Renewal & dunning benchmarks 5 Review & resources

Churn benchmarks walkthrough

~3 min

A walkthrough of the Subscriber Churn Benchmarks dashboard — Churn Rate, Voluntary Churn Rate, and Involuntary Churn Rate explained.

Three types, three different problems

Recurly's Subscriber Churn Benchmarks dashboard tracks churn three ways. The combined rate gives you a headline number; the voluntary and involuntary split tells you what's actually driving it. Always monitor all three — they require completely different fixes.

Voluntary churn

Subscribers who choose to cancel. This is a value and engagement problem — they decided to leave.

Retention fix

Involuntary churn

Subscribers lost to payment failure. They didn't intend to cancel — their payment method let them down.

Payment recovery fix

Churn Rate

The combined total. Use this as your headline benchmark; use the split rates to diagnose where to act.

Overall health

How each KPI is calculated

Churn Rate

Analytics → Churn Management → Subscriber Churn Benchmarks Total subscribers churned ÷ Total paid subscribers at start of period

Your combined churn rate — voluntary and involuntary together. Use this to benchmark your overall retention health against your industry and track whether your improvement efforts are moving the number over time.

Voluntary Churn Rate

Analytics → Churn Management → Subscriber Churn Benchmarks Subscribers who cancelled voluntarily ÷ Total paid subscribers at start of period

Subscribers who actively chose to cancel. A voluntary rate above benchmark signals a value perception or engagement problem — the subscriber decided your product wasn't worth continuing. Recurly's dunning and retry tools cannot help here; the fix is on the product and retention side.

Involuntary Churn Rate

Analytics → Churn Management → Subscriber Churn Benchmarks Subscribers lost to payment failure ÷ Total paid subscribers at start of period

Subscribers lost because a payment failed and was not recovered during the dunning window. Unlike voluntary churn, this is largely preventable — better dunning configuration, Account Updater, and intelligent retries directly reduce this rate.

Which fix applies to which type

	Voluntary churn	Involuntary churn
Cause	Subscriber chose to cancel — value, price, or engagement issue	Payment failed and was not recovered — card expired, insufficient funds, or card reissued
Recurly tools that help	Recurly Engage cancellation flows, pause subscriptions, save offers, plan segmentation	Dunning configuration, intelligent retries, Account Updater, backup payment method, expired card management
Where to start	Review cancel reasons in the Subscriber Churn Analysis dashboard; build a save offer for your most common reason	Check your dunning window length and Account Updater status under Configuration → Dunning Management and Configuration → Payment Settings

Monitor both rates separately — the combined number can hide the real problem

If your combined Churn Rate is above benchmark, check which component is driving it before acting. A voluntary spike needs a retention response. An involuntary spike needs a payment recovery response. Applying the wrong fix wastes time and budget.

← Subscriber benchmarks 3 of 5 Next: Renewal & dunning benchmarks →

Resources

Recurly Docs: Subscriber churn benchmarks Recurly Docs: Built-in benchmarks Join Global Office Hours Contact Recurly Support