Gross Revenue Retention (GRR)

Gross revenue retention (GRR) measures how successfully a recurring-revenue business preserves its starting revenue base. For a defined customer cohort and time period, a common formula is (starting recurring revenue minus revenue lost from churn and downgrades) divided by starting recurring revenue, multiplied by 100. Upsells and expansion are deliberately excluded, so they cannot hide losses in the original cohort.

Suppose a maintenance-plan business begins a year with $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue from the same customers. It loses $2,000 through cancellations and $1,000 through plan downgrades. Its GRR is 85%, even if upgrades from other customers boost total revenue. The calculation depends on consistently defined recurring revenue and on whether temporary pauses, credits, and reactivations are included.

GRR differs from net revenue retention (NRR), which takes expansion within the existing cohort into account. It also differs from the percentage of customers retained: one large contract can materially change the revenue measure. A one-time repair company should not present ordinary job sales as recurring GRR without a suitable subscription or contract model. Compare like-for-like cohorts and periods before interpreting the trend.