Free Churn Rate Calculator

The Metric That Quietly Decides Your Growth Ceiling

Churn sets a hard ceiling on growth. With 5% monthly churn, a 1,000-customer business loses 50 customers every month, so acquisition has to replace them before producing any net growth.

The annualized number in this calculator makes the compounding visible: 5% monthly churn means losing 46% of your customer base within a year. This is why two companies adding the same number of new customers can have wildly different trajectories.

Measure both views. Customer churn tells you how many logos leave; revenue churn tells you how much money leaves. A rising gap between the two means churn is concentrating in your bigger accounts, which is the more urgent problem.

What Does Churn Rate Actually Mean?

Churn rate means the percentage of customers (or revenue) that leaves your business in a given period. A 5% monthly churn rate means that out of every 100 customers you start the month with, 5 cancel before it ends. The inverse framing is retention: 5% churn equals 95% retention. Churn is the single clearest signal of whether a product delivers ongoing value - acquisition measures how good you are at promising, churn measures how good you are at delivering.

A 20% churn rate means you lose a fifth of your customers every period - at monthly cadence that is losing your entire customer base roughly every 5 months, which makes sustainable growth almost impossible. Numbers that high usually point to onboarding problems, a product-market fit gap, or attracting the wrong customers in the first place.

Churn Rate vs Retention Rate

They are two views of the same coin: retention rate = 100% - churn rate. Teams use churn when hunting problems (which cohorts leave, and why) and retention when tracking health (net revenue retention above 100% means expansion outpaces losses). Investors increasingly ask for net revenue retention (NRR) because it captures upgrades and downgrades, not just cancellations. If your NRR is above 100%, your existing customers grow your revenue even with zero new sales.

How to Calculate Churn Rate in Excel or Sheets

If you prefer a spreadsheet over this calculator, the formula is one cell:=lost_customers/start_customersformatted as a percentage. For a rolling monthly view, keep one row per month with columns for starting customers, new customers, and churned customers, then chart the churn column over time. The trend matters more than any single month - churn is noisy at small customer counts, where losing 2 customers out of 40 reads as an alarming 5%.

Once you know your churn, feed it into the LTV calculator to see what each customer is really worth, and compare against your acquisition cost.