The steady monthly rate that would produce the same result over this period.
| Month | Remaining | Retention | Churn | Month over month |
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Enter your starting cohort size and each month's remaining customer count above, results update automatically.
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Cohort retention tracks a single group of customers, everyone who signed up in the same month, for example, and follows what percentage of that specific group is still active in each month afterward. Unlike an overall churn rate, which blends customers of every age together, cohort retention isolates how a group of same-tenure customers behaves over time, which makes it far easier to spot whether a product change actually improved retention.
Month-over-month retention divides each month's remaining customers by the prior month's count. The overall average monthly retention rate uses a geometric mean instead of a simple average, the constant monthly rate that, compounded over the full period, produces the same ending result as your actual data. That is the mathematically correct way to average a rate that compounds, a simple average of the individual monthly percentages would overstate retention.
A healthy cohort curve drops in the first month or two, as customers who were never a good fit churn out, then flattens into a much shallower decline, sometimes called the retention curve reaching its floor. A curve that keeps declining steeply month after month with no flattening usually signals an ongoing product or onboarding problem rather than one-time early churn.
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