What Is Churn Rate? Definition & Examples
The percentage of clients who stop doing business with a company during a given time period.
Definition
Churn rate (also called attrition rate) measures the percentage of clients who discontinue their relationship with a business over a specific period. For service businesses, churn is calculated by dividing the number of clients lost during a period by the total clients at the start of that period. A monthly churn rate of 5% means that 5% of clients did not return or cancelled their membership. Churn is the inverse of retention, if retention is 80%, churn is 20%. Understanding churn and its causes is essential because reducing churn is typically far more cost-effective than acquiring new clients.
Churn Rate
A gym with 1,000 members loses 50 per month, 5% monthly churn rate
A salon retains 70% of clients annually, meaning a 30% annual churn rate
A subscription service loses 20 of its 1,000 subscribers in a month, a 2% monthly churn rate
A dental practice that sees 30% of patients not return within 18 months
Workflow example: Churn Rate
- 1
A salon with 400 active clients at the start of the year checks how many have not booked in the last six months: 120.
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That is a 30% churn rate for the period (120 ÷ 400).
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It adds a Workflow that emails clients 30 days after each appointment with a link to book their next visit.
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Six months later it repeats the calculation to see whether churn dropped.
Why Churn Rate Matters
Every churned client represents lost lifetime value and wasted acquisition cost. Keeping more of the clients you already have usually pays off more than the same effort spent on new ones. Identifying why clients leave, such as a poor booking experience, long waits or forgotten appointments, lets you fix root causes.
SchedulingKit — Churn Rate
SchedulingKit can help with the parts of churn that come from friction: easy online booking and rescheduling, reminders (SMS on the Standard plan and above), and Workflows that send a follow-up email or text a set time after an appointment. Client records show each person's past bookings so you can see who has not returned. SchedulingKit does not predict churn or run automated win-back campaigns.
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This definition page is reference-only. If you came here looking for software to handle churn rate, head to /scheduling-software or /features instead. Skip this page if you're already familiar with the term.