How much churn is willing departure vs payment failure?
№ 082 · Voluntary vs involuntary churn split
Definition
MetricInvoluntary share of total churn
Unit% of churned subscribers lost to payment failure; pp split of monthly churn
Stacked area with churn rates separated. Voluntary is customer choice; involuntary is card decline. Involuntary 1.5-2% is normal; above 3% means fix the dunning. Build by tagging each cancellation with reason. Example: Voluntary 2.1%, Involuntary 1.4%, total 3.5% (dunning leakage to fix).
Benchmarks
| Bottom 30% | Median | Top 30% |
|---|---|---|
| Involuntary above 40% of total churn; subscription boxes have reached 68% | Involuntary 25-38% of total churn; digital media runs 1.59pp involuntary on 4.14pp total (~38%) | Involuntary under 20% of total churn, under 0.8pp of monthly churn |
Consumer subscription businesses billed by card, Recurly network July 2026 (digital media & entertainment vertical) and ProfitWell/Paddle cross-network research 2022-2025. · Digital media has a comparatively low voluntary rate but the highest involuntary rate outside education in Recurly's data, which points to a payment recovery gap rather than an intent problem. ProfitWell/Paddle place involuntary at 20-40% of total churn with consumer products at the high end; Recurly's digital media split lands inside that range. B2B levels disagree across sources because billing methods differ.
Category split omitted: Recurly segments the split by vertical and Paddle by customer type; the segmentations do not align and B2B figures conflict, so no two-source category table is defensible.
When it looks bad
The involuntary bar rivaling or exceeding the voluntary bar, with failed payments clustered on renewal dates rather than spread through the month.
45% of monthly churn tagged involuntary: 1.9pp of a 4.2% monthly churn rate lost to card declines, most on the 1st of the month.
What to do about it
- Deploy network card updater plus smart retries plus a 3-step dunning email sequence; median recovery of failed payments is roughly 48% and mature layered programs recover 70%+ of at-risk payments (Recurly network recovered ~$100M for digital media in 2025)
- Time retries to payroll: insufficient funds is nearly half of declines, and a retry on the 1st or 15th converts a hard fail into a save (Churnkey failure-cause data)
- Capture a backup payment method and local payment options at signup in markets with low card penetration; this cuts first-attempt failure rates that run ~10% on recurring card payments
- Send pre-dunning expiry notices 10-14 days before renewal for cards expiring that month, moving the fix before the failure
Sources
- Recurly Digital media & entertainment: 2.55% voluntary, 1.59% involuntary; involuntary is the highest of six verticals except education recurly.com ↗
- Paddle Failed payments can make up as much as 40% of a company's churn; ProfitWell Retain recovery rate above 50% paddle.com ↗
- Recurly via Marketing Charts Cross-industry voluntary churn 2.5%, involuntary 0.9%; 1 in 5 acquisitions is a re-acquisition marketingcharts.com ↗
- Recurly Covers voluntary and involuntary rates by ARPU band, decline rates and reasons, recovery rates by decline reason and failure type recurly.com ↗
- SubJolt Insufficient funds is nearly half of payment failures and often recoverable on retry; involuntary reaches 68% of churn in subscription boxes (Tier 3 corroborator only) subjolt.com ↗
- Digital Applied Industry median recovery of failed payments ~47.6%; layered retry plus email plus SMS programs reach 70-85% (Tier 3 corroborator only) digitalapplied.com ↗