Churn Rate Calculator — Customer (Logo) Churn and Revenue Churn

Background.

Churn rate is the share of what you had at the start of a period that was gone by the end of it. The definition is simple; the confusion is that two entirely different numbers travel under the name. Logo churn counts accounts. Revenue churn counts dollars. They are computed from different data, they usually disagree, and quoting one while meaning the other is the most common reporting error in subscription businesses. This calculator makes you pick, and then labels the answer so the number cannot be misread later.

Banzai International's Form 10-K puts the distinction on the record in one sentence: "There are two types of Churn % measured: Revenue churn and Customer (or logo) churn," computed with a single formula whose numerator and denominator are read as "[# or $ value of]" depending on which you mean. In the same filing the company reports average monthly revenue churn of 5.7% alongside customer (logo) churn of 6.3% for the same product in the same year. Neither figure is wrong. The gap simply says that the accounts which left were smaller than the average account — which is a materially different business situation from the reverse, and a single blended "churn rate" would have hidden it.

Three scope decisions are baked into this page, and you should know them before you read the output. First, the denominator is the base you started the period with — the at-risk base, in the language of MASB's Common Language Marketing Dictionary. Customers won and revenue expanded during the period are excluded from both the top and the bottom of the fraction; adding them would let a good sales month disguise a bad retention month. Second, on the revenue basis this page counts downgrades as well as cancellations, following the gross-revenue-retention definition Instructure files with the SEC, which subtracts "downgrades and cancellations" from opening ARR. Set the downgrade field to zero if you want the narrower cancellations-only reading. Third, none of this is accounting. Box states it plainly in its own 10-K: net retention "is an operational metric and there is no comparable GAAP financial measure to which we can reconcile this particular key metric." The SEC's 2020 guidance on key performance indicators asks companies presenting such metrics to give "a clear definition of the metric and how it is calculated" — because without one the number means nothing to anybody outside the room.

The second thing this page exists to fix is annualisation. Churn does not scale linearly. Five percent a month is not sixty percent a year, because each month's loss applies to what survived the month before. Compounding the survivors instead — 0.95 raised to the twelfth power — gives 54.04% surviving and therefore 45.96% annual churn. That is a fourteen-point difference on a rate that plenty of decks report by multiplication. The same arithmetic runs in reverse: an annual figure divided by twelve is not your monthly rate either. Pick the period your figures actually cover and let the calculator convert.

Finally, treat the average-customer-life output with care. Dividing one by the monthly churn rate is the standard shortcut, and Banzai files exactly that formula, but it holds only if every customer has the same, unchanging chance of leaving. Fader, Hardie and colleagues showed in the Journal of Interactive Marketing that observed cohort retention rises with tenure purely because the customers most likely to leave leave first, leaving behind an ever more loyal mix. The practical consequence: 1 ÷ churn is a floor on average customer life, not a central estimate, and the gap widens the more varied your customer base is. It is reported here because it is useful and widely quoted, and labelled here because it is widely over-trusted.

What is churn rate calculator?

Churn rate measures loss from an existing base over a defined period. It is expressed as a percentage: the amount lost divided by the amount you held at the start of the period, times 100. Two bases are in common use and this calculator supports both. Customer churn — also called logo churn, because it counts company logos rather than dollars — divides the number of accounts lost during the period by the number of accounts active at the start. Revenue churn, more precisely gross revenue churn, divides the recurring revenue lost during the period by the recurring revenue in force at the start; it includes both cancellations, where an account leaves entirely, and contraction, where an account stays but shrinks through a downgrade or a seat reduction. Retention rate is churn's complement over the same base and period: retention = 100% − churn. On the revenue basis that complement is gross revenue retention (GRR), which is structurally capped at 100% because expansion revenue is excluded from the calculation by design. Churn is an operational metric, not an accounting one. There is no GAAP or IFRS definition, no required denominator and no mandated period, which is why two companies quoting "5% churn" may not be describing comparable situations at all. The figures on this page are always computed against the opening base for the period you select, with new customers and expansion revenue excluded from both the numerator and the denominator.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Pick your basis. Choose Customers if you want logo churn — how many accounts left. Choose Revenue if you want gross revenue churn — how many dollars left. If someone has asked you for "churn" without saying which, ask; the two answers can point in opposite directions.
2. 02Set the period these figures cover: one month, one quarter, or one year. This does not change the headline churn rate — it changes what the monthly and annual equivalents mean.
3. 03On the customer basis, enter the number of active accounts on day one of the period, then the number of those accounts that were gone by the end. Exclude anyone who both signed up and cancelled inside the period; they were never part of the opening base.
4. 04On the revenue basis, enter the recurring revenue in force on day one, then the revenue lost to outright cancellations, then the revenue lost to downgrades and seat reductions from customers who stayed. Set downgrades to zero for a cancellations-only reading.
5. 05Read the headline rate together with the basis label directly beneath it. The label states in words whether the number counts accounts or dollars, so the figure survives being copied into a slide.
6. 06Use the annualised figure — never twelve times the monthly one — when comparing against annual benchmarks or feeding a lifetime-value model. Use the monthly equivalent when comparing a quarterly or annual number against a monthly one.
7. 07Treat average customer life as a floor. It assumes a single unchanging churn rate for every customer, which no real base has.

The formula.

The core calculation is one division. On the customer basis, churn c = customers lost ÷ customers at the start of the period. On the revenue basis, c = (revenue lost to cancellations + revenue lost to downgrades) ÷ recurring revenue at the start of the period. In both cases the denominator is the opening, at-risk base — never an average of opening and closing, and never a figure that includes customers or revenue added during the period. Retention rate is the complement, 1 − c, over that same base and period. Converting between period lengths is where most implementations go wrong, so it is done here by compounding the survival probability rather than scaling the loss rate. If a fraction c is lost over a period of L months, the share surviving is (1 − c), the monthly survival rate is (1 − c) raised to the power 1/L, and the annual survival rate is (1 − c) raised to the power 12/L. Annualised churn is one minus that: 1 − (1 − c)^(12/L). At the worked example's 5% monthly churn, 0.95^12 = 0.5403600877, so 54.04% of the opening cohort survives the year and annualised churn is 45.96% — not the 60% that multiplying by twelve would give. Average customer life is 1 ÷ the monthly equivalent churn rate: at 5% a month that is 20.00 months, and at the 5.5% monthly revenue churn in the worked example it is 18.18 months. That relation is exact only when every customer carries the same constant probability of leaving, so it is reported as a floor rather than an estimate; it is capped at 1,200 months because at zero churn the division is undefined. On rounding: every intermediate quantity in this calculator is carried at full arbitrary-precision decimal width and nothing is rounded until the final result is returned. In particular the churn rate is not rounded to two decimals before being raised to the 12/L power, which would move the annualised answer by several basis points.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]Banzai International, Inc. — Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2024 (filed 2025-04-15, accession 0000950170-25-054303), Item 7 MD&A, "Customer Churn %": "There are two types of Churn % measured: Revenue churn and Customer (or logo) churn. The formula for calculating Churn % is: Churn % = [# or $ value of] Deactivations / [# or $ value of] Active Customers (Beginning of period)." Discloses average monthly revenue churn of 5.7% against customer (logo) churn of 6.3% for 2024, and "Customer Life (# of months) = 1 / Churn %". Primary filed source; free and independent. Retrieved 2026-07-29.
2. [2]Instructure Holdings, Inc. — Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022 (accession 0000950170-23-003203), Item 7 MD&A, "Net Revenue Retention Rate; Gross Revenue Retention Rate": gross revenue retention is calculated "by subtracting downgrades and cancellations over a 12-month period from ARR at the beginning of the corresponding 12-month period for a particular customer cohort and dividing the result by the ARR from the beginning of the same 12-month period." This is the second, independent authority used to confirm the opening-base denominator and the inclusion of downgrades. Retrieved 2026-07-29.
3. [3]MASB (Marketing Accountability Standards Board) — Common Language / Universal Marketing Dictionary, entry "Retention Rate": "Retention rate is the ratio of the number of retained customers to the number at risk"; "Retention rate (%) = [Number of customers retained ÷ Number of customers at risk] x 100". Sourced by MASB from Farris, P. W., Bendle, N. T., Pfeifer, P. E. & Reibstein, D. J., Marketing Metrics: The Definitive Guide to Measuring Marketing Performance, 2nd ed. (Pearson, 2010). Retrieved 2026-07-29.
4. [4]Fader, P. S., Hardie, B. G. S., Liu, Y., Davin, J. & Steenburgh, T. (2018). "'How to Project Customer Retention' Revisited: The Role of Duration Dependence." Journal of Interactive Marketing, 43, 1–16. "Cohort-level retention rates increase because those customers with high churn propensities drop out early on, leaving an ever-increasing proportion of customers who have low propensities to churn." Link is the authors' own full-text copy hosted at London Business School; the journal version (Elsevier) is paywalled. Retrieved 2026-07-29.
5. [5]U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — Commission Guidance on Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations, Release Nos. 33-10751; 34-88094; FR-87, 85 Fed. Reg. 10568 (Feb. 25, 2020), Section II "Key Performance Indicators and Metrics", pp. 10569–10570. A company presenting a metric should accompany it with "a clear definition of the metric and how it is calculated", why it is useful to investors, and how management uses it. Official Federal Register text via GPO govinfo; free and independent. Retrieved 2026-07-29.
6. [6]Box, Inc. — Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2025, Item 7 MD&A, "Net Retention Rate": "Net retention rate is an operational metric and there is no comparable GAAP financial measure to which we can reconcile this particular key metric." Cited for the absence of any accounting-standard definition of retention and churn metrics. Retrieved 2026-07-29.