Net Revenue Retention (NRR) Calculator

What is net revenue retention (NRR)?

Net revenue retention (NRR), also called net dollar retention (NDR), measures how much recurring revenue you keep and grow from existing customers over a period, usually a year. It starts from the ARR those customers paid at the beginning, adds expansion from upsells, subtracts contraction from downgrades and the ARR lost to cancellations, and divides by the starting ARR. New-logo revenue never counts.

An NRR above 100% means the installed base grows even with zero new sales, which is why investors read it as the quality score of a SaaS business. Below 100%, every new deal first refills a leak before it grows the company.

The net revenue retention formula

NRR = (starting ARR + expansion − contraction − churned ARR) ÷ starting ARR × 100.

Worked example with this calculator's default totals: $10.0M starting ARR, $1.4M of upsells, $0.3M of downgrades, and $0.9M cancelled gives (10.0 + 1.4 − 0.3 − 0.9) ÷ 10.0 = 102%. The same four inputs also produce GRR, (10.0 − 0.3 − 0.9) ÷ 10.0 = 88%, which is the floor under that 102%.

What is a good net revenue retention rate?

Published medians vary mostly by deal size. SaaS Capital's annual private-company survey and public-company disclosures cluster as follows, so benchmark within your segment rather than against a single number.

NRR vs. GRR vs. logo retention

The three retention metrics answer different questions from the same account list. NRR includes expansion, so it can hide churn behind strong upsell. GRR excludes expansion and can never exceed 100%, which is why finance plans on it. Logo retention counts customers rather than dollars, so it tells you whether you are losing many small accounts or a few large ones. This calculator computes all three from one paste.

How to improve net revenue retention

The levers rank by typical impact: catch churn before the renewal (each saved account protects both its ARR and its future expansion), expand inside healthy accounts (seat growth and tier upgrades are the entire gap between GRR and NRR), price so growth accrues to you (usage- or seat-based models outperform flat licenses on NRR), and fix onboarding (accounts that reach first value in the first month renew at materially higher rates). Watching the signals behind those levers continuously is the job GainTrace automates.