Research

Subscription churn and win-back: the 2026 numbers

Updated 17 Oct 2026 · 5 min read

What percentage of churned app subscribers come back?

RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps 2026 covers 115,000+ apps and $16B+ in revenue (RevenueCat SOSA 2026). It measures reactivation: the share of churned subscribers who subscribe again within one year.

Checked 17 Oct 2026. The SOSA report page rounds the monthly figure to 20%; the blog gives 20.1%.

Two things to take from this. Annual subscribers who leave are mostly gone for good: 95% never return. And monthly reactivation rose from 13.7% to 20.1% in a year, so a fifth of the people you lost this month may pay you again with or without a campaign. Any tool that charges on returns should only count returns it can tie to a message. Our rules are on the pricing page.

What is involuntary churn and how big is it?

Involuntary churn is when a subscription ends because a payment failed, not because the person chose to leave. On app stores it is far bigger on Google Play than on the App Store.

The two RevenueCat sources give slightly different figures. They were published at different times and may use different data cuts, so we show both with their own source.

The same RevenueCat post says platform defaults alone recover roughly 10% to 15% of failed payments, that Apple's data indicates 90% of billing issues resolve within a 28-day grace period, and that Google reports grace periods give a 57% higher recovery rate (RevenueCat blog, 2 Apr 2026). Apple retries failed renewals for up to 60 days; grace periods can be 3 or 6 days for weekly plans and 3, 16 or 28 days for monthly and longer plans (Apple developer docs).

What is a good renewal rate for a subscription app?

Month 1 accounts for 35% of annual plan cancellations, and month 12 brings a 9% to 14% spike (RevenueCat SOSA 2026 part 2). AI apps earn 41% more revenue per payer but churn 30% faster (RevenueCat SOSA 2026).

Free trial cancellations

84% of 3-day trial cancellations happen between Day 0 and Day 1 (RevenueCat SOSA 2026 part 2). Median trial-to-paid conversion is 42.5% for trials of 17 to 32 days, 37.4% for 5 to 9 days, and 25.5% for 4 days or less (RevenueCat SOSA 2026). Hard paywalls convert 10.7% of downloads to paid by day 35, against 2.1% for freemium (RevenueCat SOSA 2026). More on what to do about it: winning back expired trials.

SaaS and payment recovery benchmarks

Recurly's page has some internal inconsistencies; we quote its table values. Vendor numbers describe each vendor's own customers.

How we picked these numbers

We only list a number if we read it on the linked page on 17 October 2026. Vendor numbers are labelled as vendor numbers. Where two sources from the same company disagree, we show both. We left out figures we saw quoted on other sites without a source.

Winback's own data: we have none to publish yet. Winback is new. Once we have enough anonymised returns to say something honest, we will add them here with the sample size.

Related: churn glossary, RevenueCat win-back, revenue calculator.

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