What is a good subscription churn rate?

Published benchmarks put monthly DTC subscription churn somewhere between 5% and 8.5%, with under 7% considered good and under 5% top quartile. But your category moves that range more than your performance does, so the headline number isn't much use on its own.

One caveat before we start: these figures come from aggregated industry benchmarks, not a single controlled study, and the sources disagree with each other by two to three points. Use the ranges to get your bearings rather than as a target to hit.

What is the typical range?

Across consumer subscription ecommerce, published averages sit at roughly 5–8% monthly, with one cross-category average close to 5.3%. Benchmarks focused specifically on DTC in 2026 run a little higher, at 6.5–8.5%.

The spread between sources tells you something too. Different people count churn differently, and that's the first thing to sort out before you compare yourself to anyone.

Why does category matter more than performance?

Because the two main subscription models keep customers in fundamentally different ways, and no amount of good execution closes that gap.

Replenishment (supplements, household consumables, pet food) runs about 5–8% monthly. The subscription follows real consumption. The customer runs out, and the next delivery shows up.

Curation (beauty and apparel boxes) runs about 10–15%. The customer already has enough stuff. Whether they stay depends on novelty, and novelty wears off.

Broken down further, published figures look roughly like this: supplements 5–8%, consumables 5–8%, coffee 5–10%, pet 6–10%, beauty boxes 8–14%, meal kits 8–15%.

A meal kit brand at 11% is doing well. A supplement brand at 11% has a problem. It's the same number read two opposite ways, which is why you can't answer "what's a good churn rate" without knowing the category. It's also the first thing to check before deciding whether your brand should offer subscriptions.

What does billing period do to the number?

More than almost anything else you can change. Annual billing reportedly cuts monthly-equivalent churn by 60–80% on the same product, so something churning at 5–8% monthly drops to 0.5–1.5% monthly-equivalent.

That isn't really better retention, though. You've just removed eleven of the twelve moments where someone could leave. The customer who would have canceled in month three is still unhappy in month three. They just can't do anything about it until renewal comes around.

So any comparison has to be like-for-like. A brand quoting 1.2% churn on annual billing and a brand quoting 7% on monthly could have exactly the same underlying retention. If you move customers to annual, your churn rate will drop right away and you won't have learned anything about your product.

How much churn is people choosing to leave?

Somewhere between 60% and 75%. The other 25–40% is involuntary: payments that failed and ran out of retry attempts.

That split deserves more attention than it gets, because the involuntary chunk is the cheapest thing you'll ever fix. Those customers never decided to leave. Their card expired, or their bank declined a routine charge. Getting them back takes dunning logic, card-updater services and better retry timing. It's plumbing, not persuasion.

If you've never separated the two in your reporting, do that first. Brands try to fix a payments problem with a retention email all the time.

How should I measure my own?

Pin down your definition first, and write it down.

Decide whether you're counting cancellations in the period against active subscribers at the start, and whether a pause counts as churn. It shouldn't. Pausing is what stops people churning, and counting it as churn punishes the exact behavior you want more of.

Then measure by cohort instead of in aggregate. A blended monthly rate hides the pattern that matters, which is that most subscription churn happens in the first two or three cycles. A brand losing 8% a month with 25% of that in cycle one has an onboarding and expectations problem. A brand losing 8% evenly across the board has a product or value problem. They need different fixes, and the blended number can't tell them apart. Churn also sets the lifetime value side of your LTV to CAC ratio, so measure both the same way.

What is a reasonable target?

Your own rate from six months ago, improved, using the same definition, billing period and category mix.

If you want an outside benchmark, under 7% monthly is respectable for most replenishment categories, under 5% is very good, and anything under 3% on monthly billing is either exceptional or a measurement mistake. Check the measurement first.

We rebuild subscription retention for DTC brands, starting by separating voluntary from involuntary churn. That step usually changes what the problem turns out to be. After our rebuild for Beast Mode Soap, retention beats the platform average.