Payment failure rate

Why it matters

Failure rate makes small problems visible. Going from 5% to 7% failure sounds small, but it is 40% more failed payments and the same rise in customers who might leave.

Worked example

The table shows the columns this metric needs from six months of a made-up subscription brand. Add each column up over the six months, then put the totals into the formula:

(3,594 − 3,004) ÷ 3,594 × 100 = 16.42%

Add up first, then divide. Averaging the six monthly figures gives a slightly different answer, because it counts a small month the same as a large one.

Month by month

Payment failure rate calculator

How to read it

Look at failure reasons where your payment gateway reports them: customer-side reasons (wrong PIN, insufficient balance, cancelled) need different fixes from bank-side reasons (timeouts, declines).

Common mistakes

• Report success or failure rate, not both; they are the same information.
• A customer cancelling a UPI request is counted as a failure by most gateways, though nothing broke.
• Fraud-check rejections are deliberate failures. Track them separately so a stricter rule is not mistaken for an outage.

Calculate payment failure rate in Excel, SQL or Python

The quickest version, for the sample sheet laid out as in the CSV (headers in row 1, months in rows 2 to 7):

=(SUM(S2:S7) - SUM(T2:T7)) / SUM(S2:S7)

• Payment failure rate in Excel and Google Sheets — per-month formula and zero-safe version
• Payment failure rate in SQL — query by month and for the period
• Payment failure rate in Python (pandas) — pandas script with expected output

Related metrics

• Payment success rate
• Checkout abandonment rate

See all business metrics, or the statistics methods that sit behind them.

Questions people ask

What is payment failure rate?

Payment failure rate is the percentage of online payment attempts that did not succeed: failed attempts divided by all attempts, times 100. It is 100 minus the payment success rate.

How do you calculate payment failure rate?

Payment failure rate = (Payment attempts − Payments captured) ÷ Payment attempts × 100. For example, with six months of sample data: (3,594 − 3,004) ÷ 3,594 × 100 = 16.42%.

What is the payment failure rate formula in Excel?

With the sample data laid out as in the downloadable CSV, =(SUM(S2:S7) - SUM(T2:T7)) / SUM(S2:S7) gives the figure for the whole period (format the cell as a percentage). For one month, use =(S2 - T2) / S2 and fill it down.

What is a good payment failure rate?

There is no figure that is right for every business: it depends on your products, prices and channels. Look at failure reasons where your payment gateway reports them: customer-side reasons (wrong PIN, insufficient balance, cancelled) need different fixes from bank-side reasons (timeouts, declines).

Check how stable it is

• Standard deviation
• Moving average
• Z-score
• Linear trend forecast

Guides

• How to find out what changed in your sales data — 2 min read
• Real change or random noise? A plain guide to reading your numbers — 2 min read
• Excel data analysis: formulas, PivotTables and the ToolPak — 3 min read

About the data on this page

The figures come from a small made-up dataset, printed above in full so you can check every number by hand. Download it as monthly.csv. The results are computed from those rows when the page is built, and the Excel formulas, SQL and Python on these pages are run against the same rows before publishing, so the code and the answers agree.

To get these numbers from your own data without writing formulas, try AnalyzeIt: ask in plain words and it shows the working behind every figure.