Failed Payment Analysis
Failed Payment Analysis measures the volume and value of Stripe charges that do not succeed, broken down by the failure reason Stripe returns, such as insufficient funds, expired card, do not honour or fraud block. In Stripe data, each failed charge carries an outcome and a decline code, so the analysis groups failures by cause, card network, customer and whether the payment was a first attempt or a renewal. It turns raw failure events into a clear picture of how much revenue is at risk and which causes are recoverable.
Stripe metric
Failed Payment Rate = Failed Charges / Total Charge Attempts x 100
Failed Payment Analysis measures the volume and value of Stripe charges that do not succeed, broken down by the failure reason Stripe returns, such as insufficient funds, expired card, do not honour or fraud block. In Stripe data, each failed charge carries an outcome and a decline code, so the analysis groups failures by cause, card network, customer and whether the payment was a first attempt or a renewal. It turns raw failure events into a clear picture of how much revenue is at risk and which causes are recoverable.
Full guide: definition, formula, and benchmarksHow to calculate Failed Payment Analysis
Failed Payment Rate = Failed Charges / Total Charge Attempts x 100
Why Failed Payment Analysis matters for Stripe users
Not every failed Stripe charge is a lost sale. Soft declines such as insufficient funds or a temporary issuer block often recover on retry, while hard declines like a closed account rarely will. Without breaking failures down by decline reason, a team cannot tell how much of the lost revenue is genuinely recoverable, and it tends to either over invest in dunning or leave money on the table.
For subscription businesses this is the single largest driver of involuntary churn. Renewals that fail on an expired card look identical to a cancellation in the top line numbers, but the cause and the fix are completely different. Analysing failures by reason lets you target retries, card updater prompts and dunning emails where they actually move recovered revenue.
Driver
Conversion rate
Outcome · 58% contribution
Revenue
Understand and act on Failed Payment Analysis with KPI Tree
Sync your Stripe charges, payment intents and balance transactions into your warehouse and compute Failed Payment Analysis in KPI Tree, grouping failed charges by decline code, card network and renewal versus first attempt. Place it in a metric tree alongside charge success rate and card decline rate so you can see how failure causes feed into recovered revenue and involuntary churn.
Assign RACI ownership so a payments or finance owner is accountable for the recoverable share, with revenue operations consulted on dunning changes. Set a weekly review cadence in KPI Tree to watch decline reason trends and confirm that retry and card update flows are closing the gap.
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Related Stripe metrics Ready to add to your trees.
Charge Success Rate
PaymentsCharge Success Rate = (Successful Charges / Total Charge Attempts) × 100
Charge success rate is the percentage of payment attempts that are successfully authorised and captured. It encompasses card network approvals, 3D Secure completions, and gateway processing outcomes.
View metric
Card Decline Rate
PaymentsCard Decline Rate = (Declined Card Transactions / Total Card Transaction Attempts) × 100
Card decline rate is the percentage of card payment attempts that are refused by the issuing bank or card network. It captures both soft declines, which may succeed on retry, and hard declines, which require customer action to resolve.
View metric
Dispute Rate
PaymentsDispute Rate = (Disputes Initiated / Total Transactions) × 100
Dispute rate measures the percentage of transactions that customers formally dispute through their card issuer. Unlike chargeback rate, which focuses on completed chargebacks, dispute rate includes all initiated disputes regardless of outcome.
View metric
Chargeback Rate
PaymentsChargeback Rate = (Chargebacks / Total Transactions) × 100
Chargeback rate is the percentage of transactions that result in a customer-initiated dispute with their card issuer. Keeping this rate below card network thresholds is essential to maintaining processing privileges.
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