What Is Net Revenue Retention?

Net revenue retention (NRR) measures the percentage of recurring revenue a business retains from its existing customers over a period, after accounting for upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations — but before counting any revenue from new customers. An NRR above 100% means existing customers are growing revenue faster than churn and downgrades shrink it.

How it’s calculated

NRR = (Starting MRR + Expansion − Contraction − Churn) / Starting MRR, expressed as a percentage. A business with $10,000 in starting MRR that gains $1,000 from upsells, loses $500 to downgrades, and loses $800 to cancellations ends the period at $9,700 — an NRR of 97%.

Why it matters more than gross churn alone

Gross churn only counts cancellations. NRR also captures the customers who stay but shrink their spend, and gives credit for customers who grow it — which matters because a business can have “acceptable” churn on paper while still losing ground if the accounts that stay are consistently downgrading.

In a GoHighLevel agency context

For agencies running SaaS Mode, NRR combines sub-account cancellations with plan downgrades and upgrades across the client base. A sub-account that stays but drops from a premium plan to a basic one hurts NRR the same way a cancellation does, just less visibly — which is why revenue tracking per sub-account, not just a login count, is necessary to see the full picture of where recurring revenue is actually heading.