Revenue churn
Also called: MRR churn, ARR churn, Dollar churn
The percentage of recurring revenue lost during a period through cancellations and downgrades.
Revenue churn = (Churned MRR + Contraction MRR) ÷ Starting MRR
Revenue churn weights each lost customer by what they were actually paying. It is the mirror image of gross revenue retention: a business with 92% GRR has 8% revenue churn over the same period.
Gross versus net revenue churn
The term is used loosely, which causes real confusion in board packs.
- Gross revenue churn counts only losses — cancellations plus downgrades. It cannot be negative.
- Net revenue churn subtracts expansion from those losses. It can be negative, and “negative net churn” is a common way of saying NRR is above 100%.
Always state which one you mean. A deck that says “our churn is −4%” and a deck that says “our churn is 8%” can describe the same company in the same quarter.
Voluntary versus involuntary
A meaningful share of revenue churn in subscription businesses is not a decision at all — it is a failed card, an expired card, or an invoice nobody paid. That is involuntary churn, and it responds to dunning rather than to product or account management.
Separating the two is worth doing before you act on the number. Involuntary churn is a billing-operations problem with a mechanical fix. Voluntary churn is a product, pricing or relationship problem, and no amount of retry logic will touch it.
Stop calculating this in a spreadsheet
Bunny computes SaaS metrics, revenue schedules and retention from your live billing data — because quoting, subscriptions, usage and invoicing all sit in one system.