What Is a Good App Churn Rate? Benchmarks by Category

A good monthly app churn rate is under 5-6% for most subscription categories, though it varies widely. Fintech and banking apps hold closer to 4-5% monthly loss, while gaming and social apps often lose 8-10% or more.

When I audit retention data for subscription clients, the number that gets misread most often is churn. Teams see one blended percentage and treat it as one problem. But a chunk of it is a billing failure, and that has nothing to do with whether the customer wanted to stay.

Get the category and the cause right first. Then you'll know if your number is worth worrying about before you spend a quarter on it.

Key takeaways

• Compare your app churn rate to your own category's benchmark.
• Fintech apps lose 4-5% of subscribers monthly, gaming and social 8-10%.
• Annual plans retain far better than monthly plans, and both beat weekly plans.
• Billing errors cause 15% of App Store cancellations and 28% on Google Play.
• Some churn is a failed payment, not a customer who chose to leave.

What counts as a good app churn rate?

A good monthly app churn rate is under 5-6% for most subscription categories, but the right number depends on your category and billing frequency. App churn rate is the share of subscribers you lose in a period. There is no single "good" figure for it.

Two things move the baseline before you even look at your product. Category is the first. Gaming and social apps churn faster than finance or productivity apps, because their core use is easier to walk away from.

How often you bill matters just as much. Annual plans hold subscribers far longer than monthly or weekly ones inside the same app.

The gap between plan types is bigger than most teams expect. Annual-plan subscribers retain at a 44.1% median after 12 months. Monthly plans hold 17.0%, and weekly plans just 3.4%. That spread comes from billing frequency alone, before category is even in the picture.

So a single blended churn number tells you almost nothing. It mixes plan types and ignores category. The same app can look bad on a blended number and fine once you split it by plan and hold it against its own category.

Average app churn rate by category

Retention benchmarks vary sharply by category, with a spread of nearly ten times between the highest and lowest at the same point. Finance and gaming sit at opposite ends, and the table below has the row-by-row figures.

These are retention numbers, meaning the share of users still active, so read them as the flip side of churn rather than the same measure.

The spread comes down to how much people use the app day to day. A banking app gets checked on a recurring, needs-based cadence that survives past the first week.

Casual and hyper-casual games depend on novelty that fades fast without a strong habit loop. So their users drop off almost as soon as the newness wears off.

These are third-party aggregated figures, not first-party Churn.io numbers. Definitions of retention vary slightly by source. Treat the table as directional, and re-check a fresher source before you cite it more than a year out.

App churn rate benchmark table by category

Day 30 retention ranges from 11.6% for finance apps down to 2.3% for the hardest-churning games, per Sendbird's 2024 industry breakdown. That spread is wide enough that no cross-category benchmark is worth much.

Read your number against your own category's row below:

Figures cite Statista and AppsFlyer data via Sendbird. Gaming's numbers drop off fast. Strong day 1 retention collapses by day 30, because a game can win the install and still lose the habit.

Monthly vs. annual plans: why frequency changes the number

How often you charge a subscriber sets how often they can leave, which is why plan mix swings your churn number as much as your product does.

A weekly subscriber renews 52 times a year, and each renewal is a chance to reconsider or hit a failed charge. An annual subscriber gets one renewal in the same span.

Someone who paid for a year has already committed up front, and they don't face a renewal prompt for twelve months. A weekly plan puts that decision in front of the user every seven days. That's why weekly retention sits so low.

So an app heavy on weekly trials shows a scary headline number that says nothing about how its annual base is doing.

Split the rate by plan before you read a high number as a product problem.

Voluntary vs. involuntary app churn

Voluntary churn is a subscriber who decides to stop, while involuntary churn is one whose payment failed. A meaningful share of app cancellations fall in that second group, where the user never chose to leave.

A billing failure cancels the subscription through the platform's own failure handling. An expired card, an insufficient-funds decline, or a bank flagging the charge ends the subscription.

The person was active right up to the renewal and wanted to keep paying, then lost the app anyway when the charge failed.

The share is large enough to matter. In RevenueCat's 2025 data, billing errors account for 15.1% of App Store cancellations and 28.2% of Google Play cancellations. That gap comes down to how each platform handles a failed renewal.

Read this as a floor on your involuntary share. It measures billing errors as a portion of cancellations, and no source breaks out a full cause-by-cause split across every category above.

Still, one thing holds across every category. Some slice of that churn is involuntary, so treat a high number as a signal to check the cause first.

Our full mobile app retention playbook covers both causes and the fixes that match each one.

How to calculate your app's churn rate

Divide the subscribers you lost by the number you started the period with, then multiply by 100. That's your churn rate for the period. The inputs are simple, and the period you choose is what changes the answer.

A 30-day churn rate and a 12-month churn rate on the same app measure different things. Monthly rates also compound over a year, so small monthly gaps look large annually. A rate that feels fine month to month can add up to a base you're replacing faster than you think.

This is the short version. Cohort handling, mid-period upgrades, reactivations, and revenue-churn variants all change the math. Our guide to calculate churn rate walks through each one.

Run your own numbers through our churn rate calculator.

FAQ

Is a 5% churn rate good for an app?

That rate is on the healthy end for a monthly subscription app, though fintech and B2B apps often run lower. Judge it against your own category and plan mix, since the same monthly figure means something different on a weekly plan than on an annual one.

What does a 20% churn rate mean for an app?

That means one in five subscribers is gone each month, so you replace your entire paying base in about five months. Growth then hangs on acquiring faster than you lose, which gets expensive fast.

Why is my app's churn rate above my category's benchmark?

Usually your plan mix, your category fit against the benchmark, or silent billing failures, checked in that order. An above-benchmark number is often a plan-structure or billing problem before it's a product one.

Does high churn always mean a retention problem?

No, because part of your churn is involuntary. Split the number by cause first, since fixing engagement does nothing for a subscriber lost to an expired card.