Does net revenue retention above 100% mean my customers are happy?

Q: Does net revenue retention above 100% mean my customers are happy?

No. Net revenue retention weights every customer by what they pay, so a handful of expanding accounts can hide a large number of small ones leaving. Logo retention counts customers equally, and gross revenue retention cannot be flattered by expansion at all. Read all three together.

No, and the reason is worth understanding before you put the number in front of a board.

NRR counts money, so every customer weighs what they pay. Logo retention counts customers, so everyone weighs the same. Those are different questions, and on the same book they routinely give very different answers.

The gap is not small

On the sample inside the calculator, the same customer list produces:

NRR 100.8% · sounds healthy
Gross revenue retention 83.5% · the number expansion cannot flatter
Logo retention 66.7% · a third of the customers left

A 34 point gap between the first and the last. The board hears a number above 100% while the base erodes underneath it.

Which one to trust

Gross revenue retention is the honest one, because expansion cannot inflate it. If GRR is well below NRR, your growth is coming from a few accounts getting bigger, not from customers staying.

Two more things worth checking the moment you see a healthy NRR:

Recompute it without your largest expanding account. One customer should not carry the story unchallenged. The honest answer is usually a range, not a rate.
Check new logos are excluded. Counting customers you won during the period is the single most common way the figure gets inflated, because those measure the base you began with.

What this does not tell you. Whether your number is good. Benchmarks vary enormously by segment and price point, and anyone quoting you a universal target is guessing. It is also one period rather than a cohort curve: a customer who doubled and then churned looks identical to one who simply churned.

Customer Management Tether

Paste one customer list and get NRR, gross revenue retention and logo retention side by side, plus where they disagree. Free, nothing uploaded.

Free, no signup, nothing you type is uploaded. Written by Chris Maras, who spent 21 years in operations before building these. · All ten tools