Contracted Gross Dollar Retention

What it measures

CGDR isolates the fraction of your opening contracted revenue cohort that survives churn and downgrades within a period. Unlike Gross Revenue Retention (GRR), which runs off the opening cohort of all recurring revenue sources, CGDR runs exclusively off the CARR base — signed contractual commitments only — and so reflects whether binding agreements are holding through the period. It deliberately excludes all expansion (upsells, seat additions, price increases), so it can never exceed 100%. The gap between CGDR and Contracted Net Dollar Retention on the same base is the expansion you added back on top of a shrinking contracted floor.

Why it matters

You track CGDR because it answers one sharp question: are customers honoring the contracts they signed? A company with strong new bookings but weak CGDR is signing customers who immediately downgrade or break out — a sign of poor fit, unmet promises, or pricing misalignment. Because it measures only revenue you have already locked into contracts, CGDR is a leading indicator of contract risk and customer-success effectiveness: it moves before the leakage shows up in recognized revenue. Boards read CGDR as a barometer of contract durability and the health of the sales-to-delivery handoff. It carries the most signal in enterprise and mid-market SaaS where contracts are material and binding; in consumer or low-commitment segments it tells you less.

How to read it

Read CGDR as the percentage of your opening contracted revenue pool that survived the period intact. 92% means you opened with $100M CARR and lost $8M to churn and downgrades within that contracted base, keeping $92M — anything above 100% is arithmetically impossible because expansion is excluded by design. You want CGDR as high as possible and stable or rising month over month. The most useful read is the gap to Contracted Net Dollar Retention (CNDR): if CGDR is 92% and CNDR is 110%, that 18-point spread is your net expansion sitting on top of the contracted base, and it is the only cushion keeping a leaky floor from shrinking. Always compare to the prior month and to plan, never to a single snapshot. Watch for CGDR declining even as total CARR grows — that gap reveals that new bookings are outrunning retention, meaning the contract base itself is weakening underneath the headline number.

What good looks like

Watch-outs

• Including expansion in the numerator. CGDR is defined to exclude all upsells, seat additions, and price increases — if any expansion touches the calculation, CGDR breaks and can read above 100%, which is impossible. Expansion belongs in Contracted Net Dollar Retention, never in the gross measure.
• Running CGDR off the wrong base. Always calculate from the opening contracted cohort (prior-month Closing CARR, i.e. this period's Starting CARR), not a moving live-CARR or a net-new base. A shifted or net denominator destroys the period-over-period trend and makes month-to-month comparisons meaningless.
• Ignoring the downsell component. A company celebrating 95% CGDR driven entirely by low churn can miss that downgrades are accelerating — a sign of pricing misalignment or feature disappointment. Always split CGDR into its churn and downsell drivers.
• Reading CGDR in isolation. CGDR tells you whether the contracted base holds; CNDR tells you whether the total account value (base plus expansion) is growing. A declining CGDR hidden by a rising net figure is a warning — the floor is eroding and only new expansion is holding the line. Track both in tandem.

Worked example