Net Revenue Retention(NRR)

Also called: NRR, Net Dollar Retention, NDR

TL;DR

The percentage of recurring revenue retained from a cohort after one year, including expansion, contraction, and churn.

NRR measures whether a customer cohort spends more or less with the company a year after they entered. NRR > 100% means expansion exceeds churn, the cohort is worth more even before considering new customers. NRR > 120% is the bar for top-decile B2B SaaS.

High NRR is the strongest available proof of structural value. It compounds over time and dramatically reduces the company's need for new logos. Low NRR is the leading indicator of a leaky bucket no acquisition motion can fix.

Formula

NRR = (Starting MRR + Expansion − Contraction − Churn) ÷ Starting MRR

Starting MRR , Recurring revenue from the cohort at the start of the period
Expansion , Upsell, cross-sell, and seat growth in the period
Contraction , Downgrades and seat reductions in the period
Churn , MRR lost from cancelled customers in the period

NRR > 100% means the cohort grew net of churn, the gold-standard SaaS retention signal.

Worked example

Cohort started year with $1.0M ARR. End-of-year: $1.10M from expansion + $0.05M still-active − $0.18M churned − $0.05M downgraded = $0.92M from the original cohort. NRR = $1.32M ÷ $1.0M = 132%, strong land-and-expand.

Common pitfalls

•Reporting NRR over too short a window (3 months instead of 12).
•Including new logos in NRR, which inflates the number.
•Hiding contraction inside churn instead of reporting it separately.

When this shows up in a pitch deck

NRR is the headline retention metric on the Traction slide for B2B SaaS. Tiger Global, Sequoia, and a16z all weight NRR heavily.

See Net Revenue Retention in context

Net Revenue Retention shows up most often in these scoring rubrics and investor profiles, jump straight to who cares about it and how to pitch them.

In VC frameworks

Tiger Global

Pitch deck framework

For investor types

Growth VC

Series A & B

Related terms

Gross Revenue Retention

The percentage of recurring revenue retained from a cohort after one year, excluding expansion, the pure retention metric.

Logo Churn

The percentage of customers (logos) who cancel in a given period, regardless of how much revenue they represented.

Revenue Churn

The percentage of recurring revenue lost from existing customers in a period through cancellation or downgrade.

Land and Expand

A motion where a small initial deployment grows into a much larger account through additional seats, products, or use cases.

Cohort Analysis

Grouping users by sign-up period and tracking each group's behavior over time to spot trends invisible in aggregate metrics.

Pitch deck pillar pages

Long-form deep dives on the slides Net Revenue Retention most often shows up on.

Pitch Deck Traction Slide

Build a traction slide that proves the business is working: stage-appropriate metrics, the chart shape investors expect, and three failure patterns to avoid.

Use Net Revenue Retention in your next pitch deck

Deckmetric scores your pitch across 10 VC frameworks and against 8 investor types.