Benchmarks 101: Renewal & Dunning benchmarks

Optimize your payment recovery strategy using Recurly's renewal and dunning benchmarks. Learn to evaluate invoice paid rates, reduce renewal declines, and extend dunning windows.

← Back to Scale

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

Scale • Benchmarks 101

Renewal & dunning benchmarks

Three KPIs that measure your payment recovery health — how many invoices get paid, how many fail on first attempt, and how many you recover after they enter dunning.

Navigation Menu

Navigate Home Path Overview 1 Reading benchmarks 2 Subscriber benchmarks 3 Churn benchmarks

Renewal & dunning benchmarks 5 Review & resources

Renewal benchmarks

Renewal invoice paid rate walkthrough

~3 min

A walkthrough of the Renewal Benchmarks dashboard — Renewal Invoice Paid Rate and Decline Rate at Renewal explained.

Renewal Invoice Paid Rate

Analytics → Churn Management → Renewal Benchmarks Renewal invoices paid by month-end ÷ Total renewal invoices

The percentage of all renewal invoices that end in a paid state — including those recovered during dunning after an initial failure. This is your most complete measure of renewal health: it accounts for first-attempt success, intelligent retries, Account Updater updates, and customer payment method changes combined.

Use this as your headline renewal metric. It tells you the end result of everything working together — your gateway, your dunning configuration, your recovery tools. If this rate is below benchmark, dig into your Decline Rate at Renewal and Dunning Recovery Rate to find where the gap is.

Decline Rate at Renewal

Analytics → Churn Management → Renewal Benchmarks Renewal invoices declined on first attempt ÷ Total renewal invoices

The percentage of renewal invoices declined on the very first transaction attempt. Retries are not included — this isolates your first-attempt authorization quality. An invoice recovered in dunning still counts as declined here, so a high decline rate paired with a strong paid rate means your recovery tools are working hard to compensate.

Read these two metrics together

A high Decline Rate with a high Paid Rate means your dunning and recovery tools are doing significant work — consider that a warning sign to address the root cause before recovery capacity is stretched. A high Decline Rate with a low Paid Rate means invoices are failing and not being recovered — your dunning configuration is the priority to fix.

What to do when renewal rates are below benchmark

Enable Account Updater

Automatically refreshes stored card details when issuers reissue or replace cards — silently preventing declines before they happen. Enable under Configuration → Payment Settings. This is the single highest-impact action for reducing first-attempt renewal failures.

Check your decline reasons

Filter the Renewal Benchmarks dashboard by decline type. Soft declines like insufficient funds require a different response than hard declines like invalid card numbers. Understanding which codes are driving your rate tells you whether you have a card quality problem or a timing problem.

Filter by gateway

If you use multiple gateways, compare decline rates by processor. A significant difference between gateways points to a routing or configuration issue rather than a subscriber-side problem.

Dunning benchmarks

Dunning recovery rate walkthrough

~3 min

A walkthrough of the Dunning Benchmarks dashboard — Dunning Recovery Rate explained, with optimization guidance.

Dunning Recovery Rate

Analytics → Dunning Campaigns → Dunning Benchmarks Invoices recovered during dunning window ÷ Total invoices that entered dunning

The percentage of failed invoices that are ultimately paid during the dunning window — through Recurly's automatic intelligent retries, Account Updater, backup payment methods, or the subscriber updating their payment details. A higher rate means more revenue saved from what would otherwise become involuntary churn.

Dunning optimization is one of the fastest ways to improve this benchmark. Two levers have the biggest impact: your dunning window length and your retry cadence. Both are configurable under Configuration → Dunning Management.

The default 10-day window leaves revenue on the table

Recurly's default dunning window is 10 days. For monthly plans, extending to 28 days gives the retry engine significantly more time to recover failed invoices — including the opportunity to catch a second pay cycle for subscribers paid biweekly. If you haven't reviewed your dunning window, this is the first place to look.

What to do when dunning recovery is below benchmark

Extend your dunning window

Set to 28 days for monthly plans — this fits inside the 30-day billing cycle and gives Recurly's retry engine maximum time to recover. For annual plans, you can extend up to 60 days. Go to Configuration → Dunning Management to update.

Enable Account Updater

Account Updater works reactively in dunning too — after a renewal fails, Recurly sends a card update request to the network. If a refreshed card detail comes back, Recurly applies it and retries. Enable under Configuration → Payment Settings.

Review your dunning email cadence

Dunning emails prompt subscribers to update their payment details. A 28-day window supports roughly 5 or more touch points — use this capacity. Spread emails across the window; don't stack them at the start. Configure email timing under by clicking into the campaign you'd like to edit, then click Campaign actions → Edit campaign.

Want to walk through your dunning setup?

Bring your dunning configuration and benchmark results to a Global Office Hours session. Our CSMs can review your current window, retry cadence, and email sequence and identify the highest-impact changes for your specific plan mix.

← Churn benchmarks 4 of 5 Next: Review & resources →

Resources

Recurly Docs: Renewal benchmarks Recurly Docs: Dunning benchmarks Recurly Docs: Built-in benchmarks Join Global Office Hours Contact Recurly Support