A subscriber who never asked to leave disappears from your base after a renewal charge is declined. That is involuntary churn: you lose the revenue because a payment mechanism failed, while the subscriber still wanted the product. You have until the billing system cancels the subscription to refresh the card details, retry the charge and remind the subscriber, with access left open in the meantime.

The shares of churn quoted below come from companies that sell subscription and payment tools. Each describes that company's own data. Results of billing changes come from single news publishers. The retry data covers the first six months of 2020.

What is involuntary churn?

Involuntary churn is the end of a subscription that lapses because a renewal payment failed, as on an expired card or a declined transaction, while the subscriber never chose to cancel. The subscriber made no decision: the bank or the card network did not approve the charge. Publishers gave this loss its name, and it is one of two names they use for it.

Is involuntary churn the same as passive churn?

Yes, among publishers the two mean the same: passive churn is the second label they give involuntary churn. “System churn” is a third, used by one speaker for what others call by the first two. Voluntary churn is different. It begins with a subscriber's decision, and involuntary churn with a failed payment. In involuntary churn the subscriber never asked to leave, so it is often described as solvable or preventable. Voluntary churn usually takes a change to the product or the price.

How much of subscriber churn is involuntary?

About a third of churn is involuntary in the only benchmark here that speaks of news subscriptions. Piano benchmarks put the share at 35% of all news subscription churn. The company's later benchmark report shows 29% of churn. The remaining figures stretch from 20% to roughly half.

No row in the table measures the whole market. Each figure is one company's benchmark, finding or estimate.

Share of churnWhose churnYear published
35%All news subscription churn (Piano benchmarks)2020, cited second-hand
29%Churn (Piano, Subscription Performance Benchmarks 2024 report), no sample named2024
36%Total churn across industries (Recurly)2026, cited second-hand
About 20–40%Churn (Chargebee), no sample namednot given
Roughly halfAll subscription churn (Solidgate), no sample named2026

Why do the estimates run from 20% to roughly half?

The estimates may differ because they cover different sets of companies. Each rests on a vendor's own data. Share of churn and churn rate are also two separate measures. One vendor's report on over a thousand companies puts the voluntary churn rate at around 7%. Its involuntary churn rate is around 1%. Those rates count lost subscribers against the subscriber base, so they do not contradict the shares in the table.

A person holds a payment card over a laptop keyboard
Photo: rupixen / Unsplash

Why do subscription payments fail?

Subscription payments fail above all because the money is not there. In one vendor's report, insufficient funds accounted for nearly half of all declines. The report names no industry and sorts declines into three groups by share:

  • insufficient funds, nearly half of all declines in the State of Retention 2025 report
  • risk management reasons, 25–30%
  • card-related issues such as expirations, lost cards or stolen cards, 10–15%

Adyen gives a figure of its own, with no sample and no period. It counts two decline codes together: 72% of declined transactions are due to insufficient funds or a “do not honor” code. That figure rests on different data, so do not add it to the shares above. Bank rejections, network errors and subscribers exceeding their credit limit carry no share in these sources.

Which failed payments can a retry recover?

A retry can recover a soft decline, which is a temporary refusal. The charge is turned down today and can succeed another day. Solidgate puts soft declines at 80–90% of all declines in subscription businesses. The company gives neither a source nor a period for the figure. A hard decline is a refusal the card issuer will not reverse, such as a cancelled card, a fraud block or a revoked authorisation, and it has no recovery path through a retry.

How do you recover failed payments?

Failed payment recovery happens between the first decline and the moment your billing system cancels the subscription. In that time you have five things to work with: retries, reminders before and after the failure, a grace period (days of service after the payment was due), current card details and payment methods other than the card. Portugal's Público set out three of them in a master class for INMA: pre-expiry outreach before cards lapse, smart retry logic with more and more frequent attempts, and alternative payment methods.

How many times should you retry a failed payment?

Retry a failed payment more times than publishers have allowed for, if the single analysis on the subject is a guide. In it, a successful payment took 3.4–4.4 retries on average, while publishers capped theirs at 2.6 on average. MPP Global, a subscription and billing software vendor, ran that analysis on six months of payment data. The data covered 13 million subscribers to video streaming services and to news and magazine publishers. Over those months, retries saved on average 4.5% of subscriptions to video streaming services but only 0.7% of subscriptions to publishing sites. On those averages, a publisher's retries stop before the typical successful charge would have arrived.

“Many of those subscribers could be saved. Publishers are not using retry tooling aggressively enough,” said Julian Morelis, chief commercial officer at MPP Global. His advice to INMA members was to set the retry count to at least 15 “for maximum performance”.

Stripe's documentation offers a point of reference: its recommended default is 8 tries within 2 weeks. No source cited here gives one right number. Test the count on your own failed payments.

What does dunning management look like at a news publisher?

Dunning is a fixed timetable of retries and subscriber notices that a failed payment usually sets off. Kauppalehti's dunning management starts earlier still. The publisher found it “worthwhile” to begin reminding 30 days before a card is about to expire. Its reminder flows use four channels:

  • e-mail
  • site banners
  • app banners
  • text messages

The Telegraph reviewed its subscriber journey and found places to engage readers both before a potential system cancellation and after it, through on-site campaigns, e-mails and contact centre calls.

How long should your grace period be?

A grace period longer than 14 days is what the public cases point to, although no source fixes one number of days. The Telegraph extended its grace period from four to 28 days. Kauppalehti went from two weeks to three. An INMA master class on subscriber retention polled its participants, and almost half, or 44%, of publishers set theirs at 14 days or fewer. The report on the poll says that length “might have been too short” to save the subscribers.

Kauppalehti's reasoning: the longer the time, the bigger the opportunity for a failed payment to go through eventually. Funds may be short only for a while, or the subscriber may update an expired card. Harvard Business Review extended grace periods for monthly subscriptions. Its share of failed payments charged on a retry rose from around a third to a little over half.

After cancellation comes the win-back campaign, a separate subject.

How do you keep card details up to date?

You keep card details up to date with a card account updater. This card-scheme service tells you the new number and the new expiry date of a reissued card. Visa Account Updater and Mastercard Automatic Billing Updater push the refreshed data to merchants before the next renewal attempt fails on stale data. Only participating issuers feed Visa Account Updater: they submit the new details when they reissue cards. One master class speaker encouraged her peers to use automated card updater tools. No source gives a figure for the effect at a publisher.

Which payment methods can you retry?

Credit cards and PayPal are the two methods for which retries after the first failed attempt can improve payment success. Of the 13 million subscribers in the retry analysis, 64% paid with one of the two. INMA's newsletter on why retrying payments will save subscriptions carries the full results for publishers and broadcasters. Retry tools are less useful with direct debit and with carrier billing, where the subscriber pays through a mobile phone bill. In both, the payment is not authorised in real time.

A card held against a payment reader
Photo: Nathana Rebouças / Unsplash

What have news publishers gained by fixing failed payments?

Two publishers have reported a gain. Each changed several things together, so the effect of one change cannot be separated:

  • The Telegraph reduced this type of churn by 10 percentage points from January to May, after it extended its grace period and reviewed its card retry cycle
  • Kauppalehti saw “a significant decrease in cancellations due to payment failures”, with no figure given, after it changed payment provider and extended its grace period at the same time

At The Telegraph, credit card issues were the most frequent reason for involuntary churn. Reporting down to the level of credit card provider was “paramount” to find the root of the problem. INMA's account of the case shows how to reduce subscriber churn by addressing payment failures.

Questions publishers ask about involuntary churn

Do subscribers notice when their payment fails?

No, often they do not. The Daily Telegraph in the UK surveyed its churned subscribers, and more than half had not even realised there were any issues with payment.

What happens if you keep access open after a payment fails?

Nothing that the reader notices. At Daily Maverick, when a membership expires or a payment fails, “nothing happens”. The site keeps working, newsletters keep arriving and many readers do not even realise they have stopped paying. Interestingly, the company once had roughly one in seven of its members with failed payments, representing about 14% of revenue.

How much revenue does involuntary churn cost?

On average 10% of top-line revenue a year, by the claim of one company. Butter Payments says so of subscription companies and gives no sample and no method. For publishers, no source gives a figure.

What share of failed payments can you expect to recover?

No single share exists. The three public figures measure three different things:

  • around one-third of failed transactions are recoverable through retries, with no source or sample named
  • on average 55% of failed payments are recovered by businesses using Stripe, as Stripe itself reports
  • Churnkey says it recovered 70% of all the involuntary churn it detected in 2024, and 42% on average through dunning e-mails and SMS campaigns alone

Are monthly subscribers more exposed to failed payments than annual subscribers?

Yes, by count of renewals. A monthly subscriber has 12 chances a year to cancel or to have a payment failure, an annual subscriber only one.

Do failed payments rise when household budgets tighten?

Yes, in the view of one INMA post, which gives no figure. As household finances tighten, failed payments increase through expired cards, insufficient funds and exceeded limits.

What should you check in your own payment set-up?

Check five things in your own billing data:

  • Does your churn report separate cancellations a subscriber chose from cancellations after a failed payment?
  • Who in your team owns a payment from the first decline to the cancellation?
  • How many retries does your billing system make today, and within how many days?
  • For how many days does a subscriber keep access after a failed payment?
  • Which payment methods do you not retry at all?

The public results come from single publishers. The retry count, the reminder schedule and the grace period are yours to set on your own data. Bring your answers to INMA's Subscriber Retention Master Class in June 2027.

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