Gross revenue retention (GRR) is the share of recurring revenue you keep from existing customers over a period, usually 12 months, after subtracting downgrades and cancellations but ignoring all upgrades, add-ons and price rises. It can never exceed 100%. SaaS Capital's 2025 survey of private B2B SaaS companies found a median GRR of 91%, and said you need at least 90% to keep pace with peers.
Key takeaways
- GRR = (starting MRR − contraction − churned MRR) ÷ starting MRR. Upgrades are excluded, so the maximum is 100%.
- The 2025 private B2B SaaS median was 91% (SaaS Capital). Below 90% is a warning sign.
- Price point matters: ChartMogul found AI-native products under $50 a month kept only 23% of revenue in 2025.
- GRR is the floor under your NRR. Fix it first, because upgrades can't outrun a big leak forever.
When I wrote about WiseTech in The Subscription Playbook, one number stopped me in my tracks.
Its flagship product, CargoWise, had annual churn of about 1 percent, and had stayed at 1 percent or lower for nine years.
Think about what that means. If WiseTech started the year with 100 clients, ignored sales completely and signed nobody new, it would still have 99 clients at the end of the year.
That's the question gross revenue retention answers. Forget the upsells. Forget the new logos. If nobody bought anything new, how much of your revenue would still be here in 12 months?
What is gross revenue retention?
Gross revenue retention (GRR) is the percentage of recurring revenue you keep from a group of existing customers over a period, after taking out downgrades and cancellations.
Upgrades, add-ons and price rises don't count. That's the difference from net revenue retention, which adds them back in.
GRR = (Starting MRR − Contraction MRR − Churned MRR) ÷ Starting MRR × 100
Because nothing is ever added, GRR has a ceiling of 100 percent. A perfect year, with no one leaving and no one spending less, scores exactly 100.
How do you calculate GRR? A worked example
A bookkeeping firm on fixed monthly fees (illustrative)
The firm starts the year with 80 clients averaging $600 a month. Starting MRR is $48,000.
- 6 clients leave. Churned MRR is 6 × $600 = $3,600.
- 5 clients drop to a cheaper package, $200 a month less each. Contraction is $1,000.
- 10 clients add payroll at $250 a month. Expansion is $2,500 (ignored for GRR).
GRR = ($48,000 − $3,600 − $1,000) ÷ $48,000 = 90.4%
NRR = ($48,000 + $2,500 − $3,600 − $1,000) ÷ $48,000 = 95.6%
The payroll add-on makes the net figure look better. But GRR tells the owner something the net figure hides: about one dollar in ten is walking out the door every year.
Run the same sums on your own numbers with the NRR and GRR calculator.
NRR and GRR CalculatorNet and gross revenue retention.Open the free tool →Can gross revenue retention be over 100 percent?
No. If someone shows you a GRR above 100 percent, they've let expansion revenue sneak in, or they've included new customers.
That's what makes GRR such a useful lie detector. NRR can be pushed up by a few big accounts or a well-timed price rise. GRR can only go up if fewer customers leave or downgrade.
What is a good gross revenue retention rate?
These are the most recent figures I could source and verify.
| Source and year | Segment | GRR |
|---|---|---|
| SaaS Capital, 2025 | Private B2B SaaS over $1M ARR, median | 91% |
| SaaS Capital, 2025 | Bootstrapped / equity-backed, median | 92% / 90% |
| SaaS Capital, 2025 | Multi-year / annual / month-to-month contracts, median | 94% / 90% / 89% |
| KeyBanc and Sapphire Ventures, released Nov 2025 | Private SaaS companies | 86% in 2023, expected to approach 90% |
| ChartMogul, 2023 report | Best-in-class mid-market and enterprise B2B | about 95% |
| ChartMogul, 2023 report | Best-in-class B2C | about 75–80% |
| ChartMogul, 2025 data | AI-native products, median | 40% |
| ChartMogul, 2025 data | AI-native over $250 / $50–$249 / under $50 a month | 70% / 45% / 23% |
| Procore, FY2025 | One public usage-based company | 95% |
SaaS Capital puts the line plainly: you need gross retention of at least 90 percent to have "a shot at performance parity with your peers."
Notice the contract-length row. Customers on longer commitments churn less, which is one more argument for annual and multi-year plans. I compare the trade-offs in annual vs monthly plans.
And look at the AI rows. Cheap, self-serve AI tools have been losing most of their revenue within a year. Price point is doing a lot of the work.
Work out your GRR and NRR together
The free NRR and GRR Calculator shows how much revenue you keep before and after upgrades.
Four ways businesses fool themselves about GRR
- Reading it mid-contract. Annual customers can't churn until renewal, so GRR looks perfect for 11 months and then drops. Measure over a full renewal cycle.
- Ignoring involuntary churn. Expired cards and failed payments are lost revenue too. They're often the easiest to win back. See involuntary churn.
- Only counting cancellations. Downgrades are churn in slow motion. ChartMogul's 2023 report found contraction can account for as much as 40 percent of lost MRR.
- Trapping customers instead of keeping them. A hard-to-cancel flow might prop up GRR for a while. In Australia it's about to become a legal problem: new subscription-trap rules start on 1 July 2027, including removing unreasonable barriers to cancelling. Read Australia's subscription trap laws.
How GRR connects to the book
GRR is the scoreboard for Chapter 9. Every churn tip in that chapter, from Groove's red-flag email to high-touch onboarding for the first 90 days, shows up here first.
It's also a moat metric. In Chapter 5, the "S" in MOATS stands for Switching. WiseTech's software is mission-critical and costly to replace, which is why its customers stay. High switching costs show up as high GRR.
How should a gym or a cafe use GRR?
Most local subscriptions bill monthly to consumers, so expect lower numbers than B2B software. That's fine. The point is to watch the trend.
Each month, write down three things: membership revenue at the start, revenue lost to cancellations, and revenue lost to members dropping to a cheaper plan or a pause. Ignore new joins and upgrades. That's your GRR.
If it's falling, ask the people who leave why. A one-question exit survey is enough to start. Then use the Chapter 9 playbook on reducing churn to fix the biggest reason first.
What to do next
- Calculate your GRR for the last 12 months, and separately for monthly and annual customers.
- If it's under 90 percent (B2B) or falling (consumer), make churn your number-one project this quarter.
- Run the free churn risk checklist to find where customers are likely to leave.
- Then compare it with your NRR. The gap between them is your expansion engine, explained in GRR vs NRR.
Frequently asked questions
Is gross revenue retention the same as gross dollar retention?
Yes. Gross revenue retention, gross dollar retention and GDR are the same measure. Some reports flip it around and quote gross dollar churn instead, which is simply 100% minus GRR. SaaS Capital describes churn as one minus gross retention. So a business with 88% gross retention has 12% gross revenue churn over the same period.
Does gross revenue retention include upsell or downsell?
It includes downsell and excludes upsell. Downgrades, smaller renewals and cancellations all reduce GRR. Upgrades, cross-sells, extra seats and price increases are ignored completely. That asymmetry is deliberate. It stops a handful of big expansions from hiding the fact that many customers are spending less or leaving.
How is GRR different from customer retention rate?
Customer (logo) retention counts heads. GRR counts dollars. If you lose ten small customers and keep one big one, your logo retention looks bad while your GRR may look fine, and the reverse can happen too. Track both. Logo retention tells you how many people stay; GRR tells you how much of the money stays.
Do failed payments count against GRR?
Yes, if the customer ends up cancelled. Revenue lost to expired cards and failed payments is involuntary churn, and it reduces GRR exactly like a deliberate cancellation. It's often the cheapest churn to fix, with card updaters, retries and good dunning emails. Many businesses find a quick GRR improvement here before touching the product.
What GRR should a small consumer subscription expect?
Lower than B2B software. ChartMogul's 2023 report put best-in-class B2C gross retention at roughly 75% to 80%, against about 95% for mid-market and enterprise B2B. A gym, coffee club or box subscription with monthly billing should benchmark against consumer figures, then aim to beat its own number every quarter.
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Robert Coorey, MBA
Robert is the author of The Subscription Playbook and Feed a Starving Crowd and a Director at BPAG Accountants in Sydney. More about Robert.
Sources
- SaaS Capital, 2025 B2B SaaS Retention Benchmarks (Sept 2025)
- ChartMogul, SaaS retention: the AI churn wave (10 Dec 2025)
- ChartMogul, SaaS Retention Report (Nov 2023)
- KeyBanc Capital Markets and Sapphire Ventures, Private SaaS Company Survey press release (13 Nov 2025)
- Procore, Q4 and full-year 2025 results (12 Feb 2026)
- The Subscription Playbook, Chapters 5 and 9 (Robert Coorey, 2022)
Facts and prices checked 27 October 2026. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.