Contracted Gross Dollar Retention

What it measures

CGDR isolates the fraction of your 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 — contracted commitments only — and thus reflects whether signed agreements are holding through the period. It deliberately excludes all expansion revenue (upsells, seat additions, price increases), so it can never exceed 100%. The difference between CGDR and the period's Net Revenue Retention on CARR is the expansion you added back on top of a shrinking contracted base.

Why it matters

You track CGDR because it answers the critical question: are customers honoring their signed contracts? A company with high new bookings but weak CGDR is signing customers who immediately downgrade or break out — a sign of poor fit, unfulfilled promises, or pricing misalignment. CGDR is a leading indicator of contract risk and customer success effectiveness, because it measures only the revenue you already locked in. Boards read CGDR as a barometer of contract durability and the health of the sales-to-delivery handoff. It's especially important in enterprise and mid-market SaaS where contracts are material and binding; in consumer or low-commitment segments, CGDR has less signal.

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 Net Revenue Retention (CARR): if CGDR is 92% and NRR on CARR is 110%, that 18-point spread is your net expansion on top of the contracted base, and it's the only cushion keeping a leaky base from shrinking. Always compare to the prior month and your plan, not 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.

What good looks like

Watch-outs

• Including expansion revenue in the CGDR 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 Net Revenue Retention, not Gross.
• Running CGDR off the wrong base. Always calculate from the opening contracted revenue cohort (prior-month Closing CARR), not a moving live-CARR or net-new CARR. Using a shifted or net base 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 segment CGDR into its churn and downsell components.
• Reading CGDR in isolation without NRR. CGDR tells you whether the contracted base holds; NRR tells you whether the total account value (base + expansion) is growing. A declining CGDR hidden by rising NRR is a warning — the base is eroding and only new expansion is holding the line. Track both metrics in tandem.

Worked example