NRR benchmarks: what good looks like by segment
NRR is not one benchmark — it is a different number depending on who you sell to. Across a 2024 study of 939 B2B SaaS companies (KeyBanc Capital Markets / SaaS Capital annual survey), the medians split hard by segment:
| Segment | ACV range | Median NRR | Healthy target |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise | £100K+ ACV | 118% | 115–130%+ |
| Mid-market | £25K–£100K ACV | 108% | 105–115% |
| SMB | Under £25K ACV | 97% | 95–105% |
That 21-point spread between enterprise and SMB is the most important benchmark fact most founders skip. It is not that SMB operators are worse — it is that small customers churn more often (they go out of business, switch cheaply, have less room to expand), and they have smaller absolute budgets to expand into. If you sell to SMB, breaking 100% is a genuine achievement, and you should benchmark against your segment, never against an enterprise headline you read in a funding announcement.
Across all of B2B SaaS, the rough quality tiers in 2026:
- Below 90%: something is structurally broken — product-market fit, onboarding, or pricing.
- 90–100%: managing churn, not yet building a compounding base.
- 100–110%: the viable zone, expansion and retention roughly balanced.
- 110–120%: strong, top-quartile in most segments.
- Above 120%: best-in-class, the territory where valuation multiples diverge sharply.
For productised services and consulting-adjacent businesses the benchmarks are thinner but the dynamic is identical. A founder running a £500K ARR retained service business who grows annual revenue per client by 15% through scope expansion and new service lines is running 115% NRR — and compounding hard.
Picking the right target for your motion, rather than borrowing a PLG benchmark that does not fit your model, matters. The calculators at LTV:CAC Ratio Calculator let you model what a given NRR does to your LTV and funding headroom with your own numbers.