What is churn costing you?
Every member who leaves costs you twice — the revenue they would have paid, and the money you spend replacing them. Four numbers and you'll know the total.
At 4.0% a month, the average member stays about 25 months and is worth $2,500.
At 4.0% monthly churn
You’re losing about
$21,120a year
That’s 96 members a year walking out.
About 8 every month — and you have to sign that many just to stand still.
| Where it goes | Per year |
|---|---|
| Membership revenue lost | $9,600 |
| Cost of replacing them | $11,520 |
| Total | $21,120 |
Cut churn by 1 point and you keep
$5,280a year
From 4.0% to 3.0% — one member in a hundred changing their mind each month. It’s a smaller change than it sounds and it compounds.
Why a point of churn is worth so much
Churn doesn’t subtract, it multiplies. A member who leaves takes every future month with them, and the cost of finding their replacement arrives on top.
That’s why a change that sounds trivial — one member in a hundred changing their mind each month — moves a number this large. You’re not saving one membership. You’re extending the average stay of every member you have.
Cutting churn by 1 point is usually cheaper than acquiring the members it saves you. It’s also the only one of the two that gets easier as you get better at it.
What we assumed
Stated plainly, because a calculator you can’t check is a calculator you can’t trust.
Average months retained
Approximated as 1 ÷ your monthly churn rate — the standard planning figure, and the same one our glossary uses. It assumes every member is equally likely to leave in a given month, which real gyms don’t have: first-month churn is far higher than twentieth-month. Treat it as close, not exact.
Lost revenue
A year of departures, each costing you the membership months they would have paid in that year. It does not try to value the revenue they would have paid in later years, which would inflate the figure considerably.
Replacement cost
Members lost per year multiplied by what you told us it costs to sign one. If you left that at zero, the total is revenue only.
Your averages, not your actuals
One average fee and one churn rate across every membership type. Real gyms have several of each, and the mix matters — a concession tier churning hard looks different from a full-price one.
Nothing about seasonality
January and a wet July are not the same month for a gym. This is an annualised figure from a single rate, so it smooths over a pattern you probably already know is there.
Questions people ask
Most gyms sit between 3% and 6% a month. Below 3% is genuinely good. Above 6% and the arithmetic on this page stops being a nuisance and starts being the whole business problem — you are refilling a bucket rather than growing one.
Take the members who cancelled last month and divide by the members you started the month with, then multiply by 100. Exclude people who joined mid-month — including them understates churn, because they have not had time to leave yet.
It is the standard planning approximation: at 4% monthly churn the average member stays about 25 months. It assumes everyone is equally likely to leave each month, which is not quite true — month one churn is much higher than month twenty — so treat it as good enough to size a decision rather than as a prediction.
No. They are two separate losses: the revenue those members would have paid, and the money you spend acquiring their replacements. If you do not know your acquisition cost, set it to zero — the revenue side stands on its own.
Noticing early. Most cancellations are visible weeks ahead as a drop in visits, and the gyms that keep people are the ones that reach out while it is still a quiet patch rather than a decision.
Notice them going before they go
Fourteen days with everything switched on, no card. PATO flags a member who's gone quiet and drafts the message — which is the part nobody has time for.
14 days · No card · Cancel any time
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