There is no single retention number for coaching, because a $27 a month community and a $15,000 twelve-week program lose clients for different reasons at different rates. The useful benchmarks are by program type, and most of them are published by software vendors who see the data across many accounts. Treat them as ranges, not targets.
| Program type | Benchmark | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Coaching membership (recurring) | 3 to 5% monthly churn typical; under 5% is excellent | Kourses (vendor data) |
| Group coaching program | Under 10% monthly churn; under 5% is very good; above 15% needs changes | Jeremy Haynes |
| One-to-one coaching | 70%+ retained at six months and 40%+ at twelve is strong; under 50% at six months is a delivery problem | Zanfia |
| Online fitness coaching, 5,666 clients | 82% active at month 3, 65% at month 6, 45% at month 12 | Coachway (vendor data) |
| Online course platform | 7.2% monthly churn, 58% a year | RetentionCheck (vendor data) |
| Paid Skool community | 12 to 18% monthly churn | Tools4Skool (vendor data) |
How do you calculate coaching retention rate?
Monthly retention is the clients you kept from the start of the month, divided by the clients you started with. New sign-ups do not count. Coachway's worked example makes the point: a program starts a month with 40 clients, ends with 44, and celebrates growth. But 8 people joined and 4 left, so retention was 36 of 40, or 90%. In Coachway's words, a leaky month can disguise itself as a good one.
- Retention rate = (clients at end of month minus new clients) divided by clients at start of month.
- Churn rate = 100% minus retention rate.
- Average client lifetime in months = 1 divided by monthly churn. 5% churn means about 20 months, 10% means about 10.
- For fixed-term programs, also track cycle-to-cycle renewal: of the clients who finished, how many bought the next thing.
Why the monthly number hides the real problem
Retention is not flat across a client's life. In the Coachway cohort, the steepest drop came between months 3 and 6, and the average client stayed 4.3 months. Alex Hormozi describes the same shape from his own businesses: the highest churn is in the first 30 days, often above 20%, there is another inflection around month 3, and it settles to roughly 2% a month by month 6. A blended monthly rate of 8% can mean 25% of new clients leaving in month one and almost nobody leaving after month six. Those are two different problems with two different fixes.
So track survival by cohort: of the clients who started in a given month, what share is still active at 30, 90 and 180 days. That is the number a client success team can act on, because it tells you where in the program people drift.
What does retention look like when the back end is run properly?
The numbers above describe programs where the founder or a small team is holding retention together by hand. When client success is run as a system, with results tracked per client, drop-off flags reviewed weekly and a renewal process that starts before the program ends, retention stops being measured in months. At Video Business Academy the average client retention is two to three years, with more than 30% of revenue coming from resells rather than new sales. Client lifetime value went from about $4,000 to over $50,000.
Results depend on the program, the price point and where retention started. The figures above are from named engagements (Acquisition Ace, Video Business Academy), not a guarantee. Diego also builds Ben Kelly's website, which is a material connection. How we handle claims.
The gap between a 45% twelve-month survival and a two-year average stay is not talent or niche. It is whether someone owns each client's outcome after the sale, and whether that person has the data to see drift before it becomes a cancellation.
