Failed payment recovery calculator
Enter subscribers, rebill price, failure rate and a recovery rate to see what failed cards cost each month and how much of that revenue is recovered.
A declined renewal is involuntary churn. The subscription stays open, and the rebill you were counting on does not clear. On a paid-traffic membership, that gap is revenue you already paid to acquire.
Enter active subscribers, the rebill price, the failure rate from your billing analytics, and a recovery rate. You see the lost revenue, how much of it is recovered at that rate, and what remains unpaid. An involuntary churn calculator should show the revenue lost when a renewal charge fails.
Treat the total as an estimate. Each preset copies a figure a processor or a billing vendor published. If your own report shows a different rate, enter that rate.
How the monthly totals are worked out
Monthly failed volume equals active subscribers times the rebill price times your failure percentage divided by 100.
Monthly recovered equals that failed volume times the recovery percentage divided by 100. Monthly net lost equals failed volume minus the amount recovered. Each of those three lines is rounded to the nearest dollar, and the recovered line uses the rounded failed volume.
A fourth line multiplies the monthly net by 12. That is a projection of the same month repeated, for a yearly plan comparison.
Stripe's Recovery analytics page defines a failure rate as the percentage of subscription payment volume that failed on the first attempt. The recovery rate there is the percentage of subscription payment volume successfully recovered by any means after a failure. Copy that first-attempt figure from the report, or from the matching report in your billing tool. The 9% in the failure field matches the example under the preset table. Failure rates differ by merchant, so use the figure from your own report.
The dunning calculator
The form starts with 800 subscribers, a $47 rebill, a 9% failure rate and a 29% recovery rate. Change any of them. On this form, failed payment recovery is the recovered amount: the dollars recovered from failed rebills at a chosen rate.
Use the button to run your figures. Each preset writes a published rate into the recovery field.
What each published percentage measures
The buttons above write one of these three figures into the recovery field. The failure field keeps the rate you entered.
| Preset | Rate | What was measured |
|---|---|---|
| Paddle, conservative | 29% | Recovery figure on Paddle's calculator |
| Stripe, tool average | 55% | Smart Retries plus card updater |
| Stripe, 2023 | 57% | Share of failed payments recovered in 2023 |
Paddle's revenue impact calculator uses a 29% recovery figure and notes that some customers see more. The same page estimates revenue saved from a 29 to 30 percent drop in churn, and it calls 29% the average churn reduction its customers see. The button applies 29% as that cautious recovery figure.
Stripe's subscriptions page says Smart Retries and the card account updater recover 55% of failed payments on average. That sentence is a marketing average across businesses. Recovery analytics measures that rate on one merchant account, so it can differ from the average.
Stripe's 2023 note says its revenue recovery tools saved 57% of failed payments and recovered $5.32 billion for Stripe users. That is the share Stripe reported for its users in that one year. One merchant's own rate often differs from that platform share.
Recurly's write-up of one enterprise account says the existing setup was recovering approximately 53% of eligible failed transactions, and optimized retries on that same set reached about 71%. Those two rates come from one account, so the preset buttons leave them out. Type either figure into the recovery field if you want to run that case. The same write-up says 90% of recovered transactions occur within the first 10 days of a failed payment.
What 800 subscribers at $47 produce
Eight hundred active subscribers on a $47 rebill, at a 9% failure rate, come to $3,384 of failed volume. That is 800 × 47 × 0.09, rounded to the dollar.
At the 29% Paddle figure, $981 is recovered and $2,403 remains lost for the month. Repeat that net across twelve months and the projection is $28,836.
Choose the 55% Stripe average on the same failed volume and $1,861 is recovered, which leaves $1,523 lost for the month.
What dunning does on a failed rebill
Chargebee's docs describe dunning as retrying payment collection after a transaction fails, with automated retries and emails to the customer. The ad tracker roundup explains what dunning is at more length, and it treats a failed renewal and a cancellation as two different losses.
Once you know which rebills clear, the break-even ROAS and CPA calculator turns that take rate into a bid ceiling. A rebill charges the saved card on a later date. The order bump vs one-click upsell page explains how that later charge differs from the add-on taken before the buyer pays.
Stripe's Smart Retries guide recommends eight tries within two weeks as the default. Paddle Billing retries a failed payment on an automatically collected subscription up to seven times over 30 days. Retries and customer emails are what billing platforms call dunning management.
My take
I would forecast the month on the 29% line, then swap in the percentage from the merchant's own report once it exists. The 55% and 57% figures describe Stripe across many accounts. I would keep them as context, and I would wait for the account's own percentage before I raised a traffic budget to match them.
Frequently asked questions
What is involuntary churn compared with a cancellation?
Where do I read a failure rate in Stripe?
Why do the recovery presets disagree?
Sources
Written by
Dana Rourke
Lead Reviewer
Dana Rourke is the lead reviewer at Campaign Buyer. She covers trackers and attribution on this site: she reads what long-term users report about each tool, checks its documentation and pricing, and verifies prices with the vendor before writing the verdict. Keeping the rankings honest mostly means writing down what the top pick gets wrong, so she does that first.
Last checked 2026-10-31
Comments
No comments yet. Questions and your own experience are welcome.
Thank you. Your comment will appear once it has been reviewed.