New Rebellion scored 721 Australian businesses across 81 industries. Independent and private schools rank first of 68 industries on Retention and Loyalty at 74.3, ahead of banks and B2B SaaS. Recurring billing buys only a 4.4 point edge over transactional models, a fraction of the 28.2 point spread between the best and worst industries.
The Take: The best customer retention in Australia is not run by a subscription business. It is run by private schools. Across 721 scored Australian businesses in 81 industries, Independent & Private Schools rank first of 68 industries on Retention & Loyalty, ahead of B2B SaaS, the banks and every other industry built to keep people paying every month.
Which Australian industries retain customers best?
Independent & Private Schools score 74.3 on Retention & Loyalty, the highest of 68 Australian industries with at least five scored businesses. The national average is 63.0.
That is not the surprising part. The surprising part is the shape of the list underneath them.
Four of the top five are industries few people would describe as retention businesses. Schools, accountants, managed service providers and banks. The one obvious candidate, B2B SaaS, comes fifth.
Look at the fourth column, because it does the real work. It compares each industry's retention score to its own average across the other five dimensions. Private schools are 16.9 points better at keeping people than they are at everything else combined, the widest positive self-gap in the whole set. Personal injury and family law firms are 18.0 points worse, the widest negative one.
Independent & Private Schools out-score B2B SaaS & Software on Retention & Loyalty across 721 scored Australian businesses
Why do private schools out-retain software companies?
Because retention is bought with switching costs and belonging, not with a billing schedule.
A family that enrols a child in Year 7 has made a six-year decision, and the school spends those six years building the thing that makes leaving unthinkable. Alumni networks. House systems. Parent committees. Newsletters people actually open. Sibling enrolment pipelines. Scotch College Melbourne scores 80 on retention. Melbourne Grammar, Geelong Grammar and Sydney Grammar all score 78. None of them run a subscription. All of them run a community.
The ABS Schools release for 2025, published in March 2026, shows what that machinery produces at the sector level. Independent school enrolments grew 3.4% in 2025 while government school enrolments fell 0.2%. Stretch it out and the gap widens: independent enrolments up 15.3% between 2021 and 2025, government down 0.4%. The same release put the Year 7 to Year 12 retention rate at 81.3%, up from 79.9% a year earlier.
We score the machinery. The ABS counts the outcome. They agree.
Now hold that next to the software industry. Atlassian scores 90 on retention. Canva scores 85. Those two are as good as anything on the planet. Under them the sector thins out fast, and the industry average lands at 70.4 because plenty of Australian SaaS companies have a subscription button and very little else. Recurring billing is a payment method. It is not a relationship.
Does a subscription model actually buy retention?
A little. Far less than the pitch decks claim.
Recurring and subscription businesses beat transactional ones by 4.4 points on retention. That is a real edge. It is also a fraction of the 28.2 point spread between the best and worst industries, which means the revenue model explains a small slice of who keeps customers and something else explains the rest.
The commission row is the one worth staring at. Commission businesses score 62.0, which looks unremarkable, until you see that 40% of them have retention as their single weakest dimension. That is more than double the rate of recurring businesses. Real estate agents, mortgage brokers and car dealers all earn per transaction. The data says most of them have built nothing to earn the second one. Mortgage broking scores 55.6, which is 9.4 points below its own performance everywhere else.
Where is retention weakest, and why does it matter?
Retention is the weakest dimension for 21% of all Australian businesses we scored, second only to measurement. The bottom of the table splits into two groups, and only one of them has an excuse.
The structural group has a genuine constraint. A migration agent whose client has been granted a visa is not going to sell them another one. Immigration & Migration Services scores 46.1, though with seven businesses scored that figure is directional rather than settled.
The second group has no such defence. Personal Legal Services scores 47.2 on retention while scoring 63.6 overall, which means those firms are running strong brands and decent conversion on top of nothing. Maurice Blackburn posts a Marketing Score of 72.0 with a retention score of 50. Shine Lawyers and Slater and Gordon both score 48. These are household names in Australia with real advertising budgets, and the machinery to stay in touch with a former client is largely absent. Family law, wills, conveyancing and workplace disputes are repeat needs across a life. The referral value alone should justify an email programme.
CFD brokers are the sharpest version of the same failure at 50.5, sitting 14.5 points under their own other five dimensions. It is an industry that spends heavily to acquire traders and then watches them leave.
This is the mirror image of a pattern we found in the premium positioning study, where the best-branded businesses were the worst converters. The same trade keeps showing up. Australian businesses buy the visible half of marketing and skip the half that compounds.
Methodology
New Rebellion scores Australian businesses across six weighted dimensions: Digital Maturity, Acquisition Performance, Conversion Efficiency, Retention & Loyalty, Brand & Positioning and Data & Tracking. Retention & Loyalty is scored on observable machinery rather than on customer tenure, covering return visitor behaviour, email programmes, loyalty mechanics, community and social depth, post-purchase experience and app presence. That distinction matters for reading the bottom of the table: a one-off business is not penalised for having one-off customers, it is measured on whether it built anything to bring them back. This study covers 721 Australian businesses across 81 industries, scored as at August 2026. Industry rankings use the 68 industries with five or more scored businesses. Figures under 10 businesses are directional: Immigration & Migration Services (n=7), Tourism & Experiences (n=8), Accounting & Financial Advisory (n=9) and Personal Legal Services (n=9) all sit in that band. Full method is published at how we score.
What we think this means
Here is the opinion, flagged as opinion. Retention in Australia is treated as a billing question when it is a membership question. The industries winning it are not the ones with the best software. They are the ones that made leaving socially and practically awkward, then kept talking to people who had already bought.
Private schools ranking 44th of 68 on the overall Marketing Score while ranking first on retention is the tell. They are not sophisticated marketers. They are patient ones. That is a cheaper advantage to copy than most operators assume, because the components are unglamorous: a real reason to stay in contact, a group people want to belong to and someone whose job it is to run both.
If you want to see where your own retention sits against your industry, start with Hub. It reads what you have actually built rather than asking you to grade yourself.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good Retention & Loyalty score for an Australian business?
The national average is 63.0 across 721 scored businesses. Above 70 puts you in the company of the top five industries. Below 55 puts you near the bottom of the table, where roughly one in five Australian businesses currently sits.
Which Australian industry has the best customer retention?
Independent & Private Schools lead at 74.3, followed by Accounting & Financial Advisory at 74.0 and Retail Banking & Neobanks at 71.5. Both of the top two carry fewer than 11 scored businesses, so treat the order as indicative and the direction as reliable.
Do subscription businesses retain customers better than transactional ones?
Modestly. Recurring and subscription businesses average 66.0 on retention against 61.6 for transactional ones, a 4.4 point edge. The spread between the best and worst industries is 28.2 points, so the billing model is a minor factor next to switching costs, community and post-purchase contact.
Why do law firms score so poorly on retention?
Personal legal services average 47.2, which is 18.0 points below their own performance on the other five dimensions. Most Australian firms in the set have strong brand and conversion but little in the way of email programmes, client communities or structured post-matter contact, so a completed case usually ends the relationship.