What is gross revenue retention (GRR)?
Gross revenue retention is recurring revenue kept from existing customers after cancellations and downgrades, before counting any expansion, as a percentage of starting revenue. It can never exceed 100 percent, because upsells are left out. GRR shows how much revenue the company would keep if it sold nothing more to existing customers.
Why it matters to a revenue leader
GRR shows the floor under the business. A company with strong expansion can post high net retention while losing customers underneath, and GRR exposes that. For a revenue leader, a falling GRR points to service quality, product fit or onboarding problems that more selling will not fix. Services companies track the same idea as the agreement renewal rate when they measure it in dollars.
How to calculate it
GRR = (starting recurring revenue minus downgrades minus churned revenue) divided by starting recurring revenue. A common mistake is letting price increases on renewals offset losses, which makes GRR look better than the base deserves.
Example
Fictitious numbersA software company starts the year with $8 million of ARR from existing customers. Over the year it loses $640,000 to cancellations and $160,000 to downgrades. GRR is 90 percent. If expansion added $1.2 million, NRR would be 105 percent.
"If we stopped all upsell and cross-sell tomorrow, how much of our recurring revenue would we keep in a year?"
Sources
- Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) (Corporate Finance Institute) checked 9 Oct 2026
- Net Revenue Retention (NRR) Meaning (Corporate Finance Institute) checked 9 Oct 2026