How to measure churn in Zuora

Zuora has several places that report churn, and they do not all measure the same thing. One counts accounts, another counts subscriptions, a third counts MRR, and some depend on features your tenant may or may not have. If two dashboards disagree, it is usually because they use different definitions, not because one is wrong.

This guide maps the churn metrics Zuora provides, explains what each one counts, and shows how to build a churn view you can trust. It sticks to Zuora’s own documentation: the Analytics metric glossary, Standard booking reports, the Reporting overview, the Order Mrr data source, the MRR Trend export and Order Delta Mrr (all accessed November 2026). Definitions can differ between tenant versions, so confirm them in your own Zuora before reporting numbers to anyone.

The churn metrics Zuora defines

In Zuora Analytics

The metric glossary defines:

Metric	What it counts
Subscriber churn rate	Accounts that had an effective rate plan charge last month but none this month, divided by accounts active at the end of last month. Accounts created in the current month are excluded.
Churned subscriber count	Accounts with charges in the previous period and none at the end of the current one. An account that starts and churns within the same period is not counted.
Net MRR changes	MRR movement split into expansion, contraction, churn and no change. Churn is an account going from more than 0 Net MRR to 0 Net MRR on a given day.
Annual net retention	Ending cohort MRR divided by starting cohort MRR, based on Gross or Net MRR

Two things to notice:

• These are account-level metrics. A customer who cancels one of two subscriptions is contraction, not churn.
• Gross vs Net MRR matters. Zuora’s Gross MRR excludes discounts and Net MRR includes them. The two can move differently when discounts start or end, so pick one and use it everywhere.

In Zuora Reporting

The standard booking reports include:

• Cancelled subscriptions: the number of subscriptions cancelled each month. This is a subscription-level count, so one account with three subscriptions can contribute three.
• Cancelled CMRR: contracted MRR lost through cancellations. It only includes charges whose end date condition is “Align to Subscription End”, so charges with other end-date settings are left out.
• MRR Changes Forecast: future MRR movements by type, including churn MRR, one year ahead by default. Useful for seeing scheduled cancellations (for example, end-of-term cancellations already booked).
• Total MRR Changes (in last month): last month’s MRR changes, net of discounts, based on the Order Mrr data source.

For custom reports, the MRR Trend export and the Order MRR data source give you the underlying rows.

Order Metrics vs Order Delta Metrics

If you build reports on order-level MRR, check which metrics your tenant has. According to Zuora’s Order Delta Mrr documentation:

• As of Zuora Billing Release 306, the older Order Metrics (Order MRR, TCV, TCB and Quantity) are deprecated; new customers onboarding on Orders do not get them, while existing users keep support.
• The successors are Order Delta Mrr, Order Delta Tcv and Order Delta Tcb. Delta MRR stores the gross change in GrossAmount and the net-of-discount change in NetAmount, and is not generated for one-time or usage charges.
• You can read them through Data Query (Order Delta Mrr joined to Order Action) or the preview order API. Moving from Order Metrics to Order Delta Metrics is requested through Zuora Global Support.

Reports built on the old Order MRR data source and new reports built on Order Delta Mrr can disagree. Do not mix them in one dashboard.

Four numbers worth tracking

Zuora’s metrics give you the raw material. These are the four numbers most subscription teams end up reporting, with how to get each from Zuora. For the general formulas, see how to calculate churn rate.

1. Customer (logo) churn rate. Use Zuora Analytics’ subscriber churn rate as is, or recompute it from your own export with the same definition. State that it is account-level.
2. Gross MRR churn rate. Churned MRR plus contraction MRR in the month, divided by MRR at the start of the month. Take churn and contraction from Net MRR changes (or Gross, consistently).
3. Net MRR retention. Starting MRR minus churn and contraction plus expansion, divided by starting MRR. Zuora’s annual net retention gives the yearly cohort view.
4. Involuntary share of churn. The part of churn caused by failed payments rather than a customer decision. Zuora does not split this for you; see below.

Splitting voluntary from involuntary churn

This split decides what you work on. Voluntary churn is a product, pricing or onboarding problem; involuntary churn is a payments problem, and usually the faster one to fix. Background in what involuntary churn is.

Zuora records that a subscription was cancelled, not why. To split the two:

1. Tag cancellations at the source. Cancellations triggered by the end of your failed-payment process should carry a marker your reports can read, for example a custom field on the subscription or a distinct reason in your own system. Customer-initiated cancellations get the reason from your cancel flow.
2. Join with payment data. For untagged history, look at whether the account had failed payments in the period before cancellation. Zuora’s payment retry setup (see recovering failed payments in Zuora) and the Payment Declined events tell you which invoices were in retry.
3. Report both rates separately, with the same denominator, so they add up to total churn.

Checks before you trust the numbers

• Same level everywhere. Account-level churn and subscription-level cancellations answer different questions. Label every chart.
• Gross or Net MRR, not both. Discounts make the two diverge.
• End-date settings. If some charges are not aligned to subscription end, Cancelled CMRR undercounts.
• Scheduled vs effective cancellations. A cancellation booked today with an end-of-term date reduces MRR at the term end, not today. The MRR Changes Forecast shows what is coming.
• Order Metrics vs Order Delta Metrics. Know which your reports are built on.
• Test accounts. Exclude internal and test accounts from every churn report.

Turning measurement into action

A churn number on its own does not change anything. Pair each metric with an owner and a lever:

Metric moves	Look at	Lever
Involuntary churn up	Decline reasons, expiring cards, retry settings	Retries, card updater, recovery emails
Voluntary churn up in one plan	Cancel reasons for that plan	Pricing, plan design, cancel flow offers
Contraction up	Which charges were removed	Packaging, usage alerts
Net retention down while churn is flat	Expansion	Upsell paths

Doing this with NoChurn

Zuora stays your system of record for subscriptions, invoices and MRR reporting. NoChurn reads accounts, subscriptions, invoices and payment failures from Zuora, records the reason behind each voluntary cancellation through its cancel flow, and gives each customer a churn score from 0 to 100. You can also send your own customer attributes by API and see them on the same customer record. See NoChurn + Zuora.