What's the difference between voluntary and involuntary churn?

Voluntary churn is a customer cancelling. Involuntary churn is a subscription ending because a payment failed.

How do I reduce involuntary churn?

With dunning. Retry a few times, a few days apart, send an email at each attempt and end with a final action that keeps the subscription, such as a skip or a pause.

Do out-of-stock failures count as involuntary churn?

They can, if the subscription ends because of them. Reserving stock ahead of renewals and ending with a skip keeps most of them.

What is involuntary churn?

By Manuel GutmannPublished 2 October 2026Updated 7 October 2026

What causes involuntary churn?

Card problems: the card expired, was reported lost or stolen, was declined by the issuer, or its details changed.
Bank or processor problems: fraud prevention, transaction limits, a temporary outage.
Customer actions without intent to cancel: a new card that never made it into the subscription.

Example (made-up numbers): a shop has 1,000 active subscriptions at the start of the month. 40 subscribers cancel in the customer portal; another 15 subscriptions end because every payment retry failed. Voluntary churn: 40. Involuntary churn: 15. Churn rate: (40 + 15) ÷ 1,000 × 100 = 5.5%, of which 1.5 percentage points are involuntary.

Why does involuntary churn matter?

It loses customers who still want the product. Nobody has to be convinced to stay; they only need to know the payment failed and how to fix it. That makes it the cheapest churn to win back, but only if the shop retries and tells the customer before the subscription ends.

Keep it apart from voluntary churn in your numbers. A discount won’t fix an expired card, and a payment reminder won’t win back someone who stopped liking the product. Counted together, the two point you at the wrong fix.

How does Zubs reduce involuntary churn?

Zubs has dunning built in: retries on your schedule, an email at every attempt, a payment update in the customer portal and a final action that can keep the subscription instead of ending it. The analytics dashboard shows how many failed payments were recovered. More on the dunning feature page.

Bottom line

Involuntary churn is churn nobody chose. Retry, tell the customer, and end with a skip or a pause rather than a cancellation, and much of it never happens.

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between voluntary and involuntary churn?: Voluntary churn is a customer cancelling. Involuntary churn is a subscription ending because a payment failed.
How do I reduce involuntary churn?: With dunning. Retry a few times, a few days apart, send an email at each attempt and end with a final action that keeps the subscription, such as a skip or a pause.
Do out-of-stock failures count as involuntary churn?: They can, if the subscription ends because of them. Reserving stock ahead of renewals and ending with a skip keeps most of them.