# Failed payment recovery calculator · Campaign Buyer

> Source: https://campaignbuyer.com/reviews/failed-payment-recovery-calculator-what-dunning-wins-back-on-your-rebills

## 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.

[Show recovered revenue](#calculator)

### 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](https://docs.stripe.com/billing/revenue-recovery/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.

Your rebills this month 

Active subscribers 

Rebill price, USD 

Failure rate, percent 

Type the first-attempt percentage from your billing report. The 9 here belongs to the example.

Recovery percentage 

A preset writes a published figure, or type the percentage from your report.

Published recovery figures 

Paddle, 29% Stripe average, 55% Stripe 2023, 57% Custom 

Show recovered revenue 

The figures you enter and the dollars this page works out are stored anonymously, with no name or email, so we can see which recovery rates readers are testing.

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](https://www.paddle.com/calculators/revenue-impact) 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](https://stripe.com/en-ro/billing/subscriptions) 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](https://stripe.com/blog/subscription-business-leaders-are-looking-for-a-better-way-to-combat-churn) 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](https://recurly.com/blog/failed-payment-recovery-data-based-strategy/) 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.

Green marks the early part of a retry window, where that Recurly write-up says recovered charges cluster.

### What 800 subscribers at $47 produce

Failed rebill volume, with the recovered share in green and the net still lost as the outlined remainder.

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](https://www.chargebee.com/docs/payments/2.0/dunning/dunning) 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](/best#dunning) 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](/best/break-even-roas-and-cpa-calculator-for-paid-traffic-offers) 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](/compare/order-bump-vs-upsell) page explains how that later charge differs from the add-on taken before the buyer pays.

[Stripe's Smart Retries guide](https://docs.stripe.com/billing/revenue-recovery/smart-retries) recommends eight tries within two weeks as the default. [Paddle Billing](https://developer.paddle.com/changelog/2025/default-dunning-payment-recovery/) 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.

[Show recovered revenue](#calculator)

### Frequently asked questions

What is involuntary churn compared with a cancellation? 

Involuntary churn is a renewal the card issuer or the bank declined. A cancellation is the buyer ending the plan. This calculator prices the declined renewals.

Where do I read a failure rate in Stripe? 

Open Recovery analytics and read the failure-rate KPI. Type that rate into the failure field on this page.

Why do the recovery presets disagree? 

They measure different pools. One is a cautious figure on a vendor calculator, one is a marketing average for two Stripe tools, and one is a single year across Stripe users. Your own dashboard rate uses the account-level definition in the method section, on your volume alone.

### Sources

* [Chargebee: Dunning](https://www.chargebee.com/docs/payments/2.0/dunning/dunning)
* [Stripe: Recovery analytics](https://docs.stripe.com/billing/revenue-recovery/recovery-analytics)
* [Stripe: Smart Retries](https://docs.stripe.com/billing/revenue-recovery/smart-retries)
* [Stripe: Billing subscriptions](https://stripe.com/en-ro/billing/subscriptions)
* [Stripe: subscription leaders on churn, 2023](https://stripe.com/blog/subscription-business-leaders-are-looking-for-a-better-way-to-combat-churn)
* [Paddle: revenue impact calculator](https://www.paddle.com/calculators/revenue-impact)
* [Paddle: default dunning payment recovery](https://developer.paddle.com/changelog/2025/default-dunning-payment-recovery/)
* [Recurly: failed payment recovery](https://recurly.com/blog/failed-payment-recovery-data-based-strategy/)

### Related reading

The [break-even ROAS and CPA calculator](/best/break-even-roas-and-cpa-calculator-for-paid-traffic-offers) prices the rebills you collect. A decline and a dispute are different events. [How to read a chargeback rate](/reviews/chargeback-rate) covers the dispute percentage, and the [Visa and Mastercard chargeback ratio calculator](/reviews/chargeback-ratio-calculator-are-you-near-the-visa-and-mastercard-monitoring-line) sets your counts against each network's thresholds.

The [order bump vs one-click upsell](/compare/order-bump-vs-upsell) page covers the add-on taken before payment and the rebill that follows. [How we research](/methodology) explains how vendor documentation is checked for this site. The [ad tracker roundup](/best#dunning) has the longer explanation of dunning.

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.

[danar@campaignbuyer.com](mailto:danar@campaignbuyer.com)

Last checked 2026-10-31

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