Customer Retention Rate Calculator — CRR & Churn
Measure how well your business keeps its customers. Enter the number of customers at the start of a period, the number at the end, and how many were newly acquired — the calculator returns the retention rate, churn rate, and counts of retained and lost customers.
Percentage of existing customers kept over the period
86 %
retainedRetained
86%
Lost
14%
- 1
Customers retained (existing)
480 − 50 = 430Subtract new customers acquired so only the original cohort is counted. - 2
Customer Retention Rate
(430 ÷ 500) × 100 = 86 %
How does this calculator work?
Customer Retention Rate = ((End customers − New customers) ÷ Start customers) × 100. Enter your start headcount, end headcount, and new customers acquired to get CRR and churn rate. A CRR below 80 % typically signals a serious retention problem worth investigating.
Formula
How this is calculated
Customer retention rate (CRR) measures the fraction of existing customers a business keeps over a defined period — a month, quarter, or year. To isolate retention from new customer growth, the formula subtracts new customers (N) from the end headcount (E), giving the number of original customers still active. Dividing by the starting count (S) and multiplying by 100 yields the percentage retained.
Churn rate is simply 100 % − CRR: the proportion of existing customers who left. A high churn rate inflates customer-acquisition costs because growth requires replacing lost revenue before adding any net new revenue. SaaS companies often target CRR above 85–90 % annually; subscription businesses with frequent purchase cycles (streaming, e-commerce) may measure monthly and aim for 95 %+.
This calculator uses headcount only and does not weight by revenue. Revenue-weighted retention (sometimes called Net Revenue Retention or NRR) accounts for upsells and downgrades and requires revenue figures; the CRR formula here is the standard unit-based version published by most CRM and SaaS analytics platforms.
Frequently asked questions
It varies by industry. SaaS businesses typically target 85–95 % annual retention. E-commerce benchmarks are lower — 30–60 % annually is common because not every buyer repurchases. Compare your rate against industry peers rather than a single universal figure.
Churn rate is the complement of retention rate: if you retain 88 % of customers, your churn rate is 12 %. Both measure the same phenomenon from opposite angles. Retention is preferred when the goal is framing growth; churn is preferred in loss-analysis contexts.
New customers acquired during the period are not part of the cohort you started with, so including them would overstate loyalty. By subtracting N from E, the numerator represents only existing customers still active — making the rate a true measure of retention rather than net growth.
Also known as
TG we-Calculate Editorial Team. (2026). Customer Retention Rate Calculator — CRR & Churn [Online calculator]. TG we-Calculate. https://we-calculate.com/calculator/customer-retention-rate-calculator
TG we-Calculate Editorial Team. "Customer Retention Rate Calculator — CRR & Churn." TG we-Calculate. 2026. https://we-calculate.com/calculator/customer-retention-rate-calculator.
TG we-Calculate Editorial Team, "Customer Retention Rate Calculator — CRR & Churn," TG we-Calculate, 2026. [Online]. Available: https://we-calculate.com/calculator/customer-retention-rate-calculator
@misc{wecalculate_customer_retention_rate_calculator, title = {Customer Retention Rate Calculator — CRR & Churn}, author = {{TG we-Calculate Editorial Team}}, howpublished = {\url{https://we-calculate.com/calculator/customer-retention-rate-calculator}}, year = {2026}, note = {TG we-Calculate} }
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