Your monthly churn rate is the share of subscribers you had at the start of the month who canceled or lapsed by the end of it.
Divide the subscribers you lost by the subscribers you started with, then multiply by 100: lose 150 of 2,000 and your monthly churn is 7.5%.
Enter those two numbers in the calculator above and it does the math, plus the annual equivalent.
How to use the churn rate calculator
You need two numbers from the same period: active paying subscribers on day one, and how many of those people stopped paying by the last day.
Leave out anyone who subscribed during the month.
They were not in your starting group, so counting them would hide real churn.
Count every way a subscriber stops paying. That includes cancellations, failed renewals after billing retries run out, and refunds.
Free trial users who never converted are not churned subscribers. Track them as trial conversion instead.
Use a subscription platform export or App Store Connect and Google Play Console reports, and pick one source. Mixing them double-counts people who switch platforms.
The churn rate formula
The customer churn rate formula is:
Churn rate = (subscribers lost during the period / subscribers at the start of the period) x 100
Worked example: a meditation app starts November with 2,000 paying subscribers.
During the month 400 new people subscribe and 150 of the original 2,000 cancel or fail to renew.
It ends with 2,250. Monthly churn is 150 / 2,000 x 100 = 7.5%.
Notice the 400 new subscribers play no part.
A growing app can lose a lot of people and still show a rising subscriber count, which is exactly why churn is worth tracking on its own.
The average-subscriber variant
Some teams divide by the average of the starting and ending counts to smooth out fast growth: 150 / ((2,000 + 2,250) / 2) = 150 / 2,125 = 7.1%.
It reads lower than the standard method whenever you grow.
Either is fine if you stick with it, but say which one you use when you compare against a benchmark.
Retention is the other side
Retention rate is 100% minus churn rate for the same group and period, so 7.5% churn means 92.5% retention.
The retention rate calculator works it from the other direction.
Monthly vs annual churn
You can't multiply monthly churn by 12. Each month you lose a share of a smaller base, so the losses compound. The correct conversion is:
Annual churn = 1 - (1 - monthly churn)^12
At 7.5% monthly churn, 0.925 to the 12th power is about 0.392, so annual churn is about 60.8%, not 90%.
Going the other way, 50% annual churn works out to about 5.6% a month: 1 - (0.5)^(1/12).
That conversion assumes a steady monthly rate, and subscription apps rarely have one.
Churn is usually highest at the first renewal and falls for people who stay.
Annual plans also churn in one lump at the 12-month mark rather than a little each month.
Measure each plan length separately and compare monthly plans by month and annual plans by renewal cycle.
The gap between plan types is large. RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps 2026 (2025 data from over 115,000 apps) puts first-year retention at 28% for annual plans, 8% for monthly and 1.2% for weekly.
It also found that only 5% of churned annual subscribers reactivate within a year, against 20% of churned monthly subscribers.
That is one reason apps push annual plans. dub reports +207% LTV after shifting its paywalls toward annual plans, a bundled, vendor-reported result.
Plan mix changes what your blended churn number means, so check plan tests before reading too much into a single figure.
What our tests show about churn
Churn is decided at several points, and the tests in our database touch most of them:
- Price changes. TalkingParents raised its price alongside a new feature: about a quarter of customers churned, but the business came out better financially overall (before-after, not a controlled test).
- Trial expectations. Blinkist's trial timeline paywall raised trial opt-in significantly and cut trial cancellations by 4%, per Marcus Burke.
- Onboarding. Applica's goal-based onboarding for ASL Bloom came with +18% 30-day retention, alongside +15% trial conversion and +12% ARPU (bundled changes, vendor-reported).
- Forced conversion. BoldVoice tested a hard paywall with no close button. Trial starts went up, but refunds rose by more than the gain. Refunds are churn, so measure them alongside conversion.
- Win-back. Unscripted's personal reactivation trial offer drove over +240% trial starts among lapsed users, as reported in a Superwall case study.
More are collected under retention tests and win-back tests.
Is my churn rate good? Benchmarks
A good churn rate depends on plan length, category and price, so a single cutoff misleads.
Compare your monthly-plan churn with monthly-plan benchmarks and your annual renewal rate with annual benchmarks, never a blended number with either.
Our subscription churn rate benchmarks break the figures down by plan type and category, and the app retention rate benchmarks cover usage retention before people pay.
For what to change once you know your number, see the app retention guide.
Then put churn to work: the average lifetime of a subscriber is roughly 1 divided by monthly churn, so 7.5% churn means about 13 months.
Plug your rate into the subscription LTV calculator to see what that lifetime is worth.