At a glance
The percentage of successful Recharge subscription charges that were subsequently refunded (in full or part) within the period. On Recharge specifically this is dominated by cancellation refunds (a subscriber cancels right after their rebill processes and the merchant refunds them as goodwill) and quality refunds (product defect, wrong item shipped). Healthy subscription brands run 1.5, 4% refund rate; >5% suggests a structural product or expectation problem.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Recharge data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
“Daily Greens Co”. 30-day window 03 Apr 26 to 02 May 26.- 1.36% refund rate is well within healthy for a DTC supplement subscription. Typical healthy band 1.5, 3.5%. Above 5% would indicate a structural product / expectation problem.
- Cancellation goodwill (184 of 280) is the largest cluster. Standard DTC pattern: customers cancel and want the last rebill returned, the merchant honours as a retention gesture. Reducing this requires prevention (cancel-flow with pause / skip / discount offers) rather than refusal.
- Late-shipment make-goods (22) point at the 4PL. If this cluster grows over multiple weeks, the warehouse / carrier is the root cause. Recharge admin’s order-shipment view (or upstream Shopify shipping tracking) confirms.
- Duplicate-charge corrections (8) deserve investigation. Customer-portal plan swaps that double-bill are usually a Recharge configuration bug or a misuse of the swap API. Audit the swap-flow events for the affected customer.
- Promotional retroactive (28) is a process issue. Marketing applied a “welcome 20% off” promo retroactively to first-rebill, and CS issued refunds. Cleaner alternative: structure as next-rebill-discount on the subscription itself, no refund needed.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in the Recharge merchant portal: admin.rechargepayments.com. The closest comparable view is Recharge Admin → Charges → Refunded filtered by date. Recharge admin shows the running refund total at the top of the filtered list. Why our number may legitimately differ from the Recharge merchant portal:
Cross-connector reconciliation:
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
“Why is refund rate lower than I expected for a subscription business?” Most subscription cancellations don’t result in a refund. Customers cancel before the next rebill (no charge, no refund). Refund rate counts only customers who waited until AFTER the rebill, then cancelled and asked for a refund. That’s the more aggressive cohort. “Should I tighten the refund policy to reduce this?” Almost always no. Customers refunded promptly rarely escalate to chargebacks (which carry scheme fees and merchant-side dispute work). High refund rate is often the cheaper outcome compared to dispute volume. “Refund rate spiked, what to check first?” Three usual suspects: (1) shipment cohort delayed (4PL or carrier issue), (2) product quality issue (a bad batch shipped), (3) a marketing campaign creating churn-prone customers (price-sensitive cohort acquired on promo). “Cancellation refunds vs cancellation no-refund, can I split?” This card is rate; the cancellation-with-refund subset is in the Recharge admin Charges → Refunded → group by reason. Recharge tags refunds with reason codes (cancellation, defect, late, goodwill, other). “Promotional refunds, can we structure them differently?” Yes. Instead of issuing a refund after charging, apply the discount to the next rebill via Recharge Promotions. No refund operation, lower processing fees, less customer confusion. “Partial refunds, how are they counted?” Counted as one refund event, regardless of partial / full. The dollar value differs (rec_refund_volume tracks that). For rate, both partial and full count the same.