The number most often quoted for subscription businesses is that 5 to 10% of recurring card charges fail each month. That's a reasonable starting point for a US or European SaaS selling to businesses with credit cards. It is not what we see in practice. In the Stripe accounts we've audited, the share of recent invoices that failed and were still unpaid ranged from 7% to 63%, and three of the five accounts were above 25%.
So "normal" depends a lot on who your customers are and how they pay. Below are the benchmark, our own numbers, what pushes a failure rate up, and how to measure yours in a way that's comparable.
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Run free payment audit →What we measured
Our free Stripe audit reads the last 90 days of invoices from an account. We counted the invoices that had a failed charge and were still open, uncollectible or void when the audit ran, and divided by all invoices in the period. These are the accounts with at least 100 invoices, taking the most recent audit of each:
| Account | Invoices (90 days) | Failed and still unpaid |
|---|---|---|
| B2B software, Latin America, billed in USD | 444 | 7% |
| Telecom subscriptions, Mexico | 1,111 | 13% |
| Small subscription business | 171 | 27% |
| Subscription business, Mexico | 1,408 | 29% |
| Small subscription business, Europe | 108 | 63% |
Five accounts is a small sample, and most of them sell in Latin America, so read this as a range, not a benchmark. Still, the spread is the point. The same metric goes from 7% to 63% depending on the business, and a SaaS that compares itself to "5 to 10%" can easily think it has a bug when it simply has a different customer base.
The same failure-rate metric ranged from 7% to 63% across the accounts we audited.
What pushes a failure rate up
- Debit and prepaid cards. They fail on insufficient funds much more often than credit cards, because the charge depends on the balance that day. In Latin America, a large share of consumers pay subscriptions with debit cards.
- Cross-border charges. A card issued in one country charged by a business in another gets declined more often, usually with a generic decline and no reason.
- Consumer vs business customers. Company cards with high limits fail less. Individuals paying from a personal account fail more, especially around the end of the month.
- Low-price, high-volume plans. Cheap plans attract more trial-and-churn customers and more card testing, which inflates failures.
- Long-lived subscriptions. The older your customer base, the more cards on file have expired or been replaced since signup.
Measure it in a way you can compare
"Failure rate" gets calculated in several different ways, which is why numbers from different sources rarely match. Before comparing, decide which one you're looking at:
- Charge attempts that failed. Counts every retry as a separate failure. It always looks the worst.
- Invoices that had at least one failure. Includes invoices that were later paid by a retry or by the customer.
- Invoices that failed and are still unpaid. What we measured above. Closest to the money you are actually missing.
Also separate the first charge of a new subscription from renewals. A card declined at checkout, where the customer is present and tries again a minute later, is a checkout problem. A renewal that fails while nobody is watching is the one that turns into churn. Mixing the two makes both numbers look different from what they are.
What to do with your number
The rate on its own matters less than two things behind it: which decline codes make it up, and how much of it is still unpaid after Stripe's retries. If most of it is insufficient funds, better retry timing helps. If most of it is expired cards, generic declines or 3D Secure, the customer has to act, and reaching them with a direct link to pay is what moves the number. Our guide on why Stripe payments fail goes through each reason and its fix.