Logo Churn vs Revenue Churn
CRM & RetentionAlso: Customer Churn vs Dollar Churn · Logo Attrition vs Revenue Attrition
Quick definition
Logo churn measures the percentage of customers you lose in a period, regardless of what they paid. Revenue churn measures the percentage of recurring revenue you lose in that same period. A business can hold logo churn steady while revenue churn climbs if the customers leaving are the biggest accounts.
How it varies across Australia
Australian subscription businesses tend to report logo churn more often than revenue churn, largely because it's the easier number to defend in a board deck. Revenue churn typically tells a rougher story once enterprise accounts are in the mix, and the gap between the two widens as average contract value spreads out.
See retention benchmarks across Australian industries →Two churn numbers, two different questions
The share of customers who cancel or don't renew, regardless of what they were paying.
Answers: are we losing people?The share of recurring revenue lost to cancellations and downgrades in the same period.
Answers: are we losing money?What it actually means
Imagine a party where ten guests leave early. Logo churn is the headcount at the door. Revenue churn is how much beer left with them. If the ten who leave are the light drinkers, the party barely notices. If they're the ones who bought the keg, you've got a problem the headcount never showed you.
That's the whole tension between logo churn and revenue churn. Logo churn treats every customer as one unit, whether they pay ten dollars a month or ten thousand. Revenue churn weights by dollars, so losing one large account can move the number more than losing fifty small ones. Businesses with flat pricing across the customer base will see the two numbers track closely. Businesses with tiered pricing, enterprise deals or heavy expansion revenue will often see them diverge sharply.
This is also where net revenue retention (NRR) enters the picture. NRR nets churned revenue against expansion revenue from upsells and cross-sells, and can go above 100 percent even while logo churn stays positive. Lifetime value (LTV) calculations depend heavily on which churn figure you feed in, and average revenue per user (ARPU) shifts the moment your churned cohort skews toward high or low spenders.
Logo churn tells you if you're losing goodwill. Revenue churn tells you if you're losing money. They rarely move together, and a board that only sees one is flying half-blind.
How to calculate it
Logo Churn Rate = Customers lost in period ÷ Customers at start of period. Revenue Churn Rate = Revenue lost in period ÷ Revenue at start of period
Worked example. You start the month with 200 customers generating $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR). You lose 10 customers, but they were your smallest accounts worth $8,000 combined. Logo churn = 10 ÷ 200 = 5 percent. Revenue churn = $8,000 ÷ $100,000 = 8 percent. Now flip it. Lose the same 10 customers, but they were your biggest accounts worth $25,000 combined. Logo churn is still 5 percent. Revenue churn jumps to 25 percent.
The Australian context
Australia's subscription market is smaller and more concentrated than the United States, which means a single enterprise account leaving can swing revenue churn far more than it would in a larger, more distributed market. SMB-heavy Australian software as a service (SaaS) businesses tend to see logo churn and revenue churn sit close together. Businesses that have moved upmarket into enterprise contracts often see the two figures pull apart within a year or two, and that gap is usually the first sign that account concentration risk is building.
Where people get this wrong
Related terms
Common questions
Which matters more, logo churn or revenue churn?
Revenue churn matters more for understanding financial health, since it reflects what's actually happening to recurring revenue. Logo churn still matters for product and customer success teams, since it reflects how many relationships you're failing to keep regardless of contract size.
Can revenue churn be negative?
Yes, when expansion revenue from upsells and cross-sells exceeds the revenue lost to cancellations and downgrades. This is usually shown as net revenue retention above 100 percent rather than as a negative churn figure directly.
Why would logo churn stay flat while revenue churn rises?
This happens when the customers leaving are disproportionately your highest-paying accounts. The headcount loss looks the same as always, but the dollar loss is much larger because bigger accounts walked out the door.
Do small businesses need to track both?
If pricing is flat across your customer base, the two numbers will move together and tracking one is usually enough. Once you introduce tiered pricing, enterprise deals or meaningful account size variation, tracking both becomes necessary to see the full picture.
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About New Rebellion
New Rebellion is a marketing intelligence consultancy. We build tools, score Australian businesses on how their marketing actually performs, and publish Debrief every day. This dictionary is part of how we work in the open.
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