Can Gravity Payments Prove Its Customer-Retention Claim?

By a payments-industry reporter covering merchant acquiring and small-business economics
Last reviewed: July 10, 2026

Gravity Payments says its merchants remain customers more than twice as long as the payment-processing industry average and that its attrition rate is less than half that benchmark. The company also reports that its customer base doubled during the decade following its 2015 compensation change.

The figures sound precise. The supporting data are not public.

Gravity does not disclose its annual merchant churn rate, average customer lifespan, starting customer count, ending customer count, measurement period or the industry dataset used for comparison. The claim is mathematically plausible, but an outside reader cannot reproduce it from the information Gravity has released.

What Gravity Payments actually disclosed

The named company document 10 Years Later: How a $70k Minimum Wage Changed Gravity Payments, published in November 2025, contains four customer-related figures or comparisons:

Source: Gravity Payments, 10 Years Later: How a $70k Minimum Wage Changed Gravity Payments (2025).

The company attributes its customer results to experienced employees, referrals and personalized service. It says referrals remain its leading source of new business and describes representatives visiting merchants to repair payment equipment during operating hours.

Those details describe a possible retention mechanism. They do not provide the retention calculation.

The unnamed industry average is the main problem

An attrition comparison requires a denominator, a period and a definition.

Gravity does not specify whether it measures merchant accounts, legal businesses, physical locations or merchant identification numbers. A restaurant group with six locations could appear as one customer, six customers or several merchant accounts, depending on the internal system.

The company also does not state what counts as attrition. Possible definitions include:

• A merchant formally terminating its agreement.
• A merchant processing no transactions for a defined period.
• A business closing permanently.
• An account moving to another processor.
• One location closing while the wider business remains.
• A merchant switching from a standalone Gravity product to an integrated product.

These distinctions matter because logo churn, revenue churn and processing-volume churn can move in different directions. A processor might lose many small accounts while retaining nearly all revenue, or lose one large account while reporting a high merchant-retention percentage.

Gravity publishes none of those separate measures. Its statement combines customer lifespan and attrition without identifying the population behind either one.

What “less than half the attrition” would mean

Gravity’s claim can be tested through scenarios, but the result depends entirely on the missing industry benchmark.

Under a simplified model with a stable annual churn rate, expected customer lifespan can be approximated by dividing one by the churn rate. A 20% annual rate implies roughly five years, while 10% implies roughly 10 years.

These are hypothetical calculations, not reported Gravity results. They assume a constant attrition rate and comparable customer populations.

The first scenario exposes an important limitation. Gravity traces its first merchant relationship to 2004, giving the company roughly 21 years of operating history when its retrospective was published in 2025. If its comparison uses a 10% industry attrition rate, the implied Gravity customer lifespan would exceed 20 years, nearly the company’s entire existence. Most merchants could not have been observed for that long because they joined later.

The 20% scenario is easier to reconcile. It would place Gravity below 10% annual attrition and imply customer relationships exceeding 10 years under the simplified model.

Yet 20% is not an official federal benchmark.

The popular 20% benchmark has a weak evidence chain

Search results for merchant-services attrition repeatedly present an industry rate near 20%. The number often travels from one commercial article to another without a current, public dataset behind it.

A 2017 ProSight Financial Association article said that “by some estimates” more than 20% of merchants were likely to change acquirers or independent sales organizations. It linked the figure to an older trade article and separately repeated an industry claim that three new merchants were needed to replace one departure. The article did not publish a representative merchant sample or current data appendix.

A 2025 OvationCXM page also used a 20% estimate and linked it to the same general chain of merchant-retention commentary. Its article identified pricing, product limitations and frustrating support as switching factors, but it did not present a new industrywide churn calculation.

Chargezoom gives a much wider range. Its payments-industry article says some acquirers may experience churn as high as 30%, while a healthy business might target no more than 10%. Those figures come from processor recommendations and unspecified industry estimates rather than a disclosed statistical survey.

A May 2026 report from Clearly Payments estimates annual merchant churn below 10% for some professional-service portfolios, 25% to 45% for restaurants and as much as 70% for certain high-risk categories. The page explicitly says the ranges reflect operator experience, portfolio economics, industry disclosures and risk profiles. It does not describe a randomized sample representing the entire North American acquiring market.

The search evidence supports one conclusion: there is no single defensible industry attrition rate for every merchant processor.

Merchant type can change churn fivefold or more

Gravity serves a broad mix of independent businesses, including restaurants, legal firms, healthcare organizations, bridal shops, veterinarians, contractors and retailers. Its company history also records the launch of Gravity Legal in 2020, the Portals payment interface in 2020 and Poppy Bridal in 2022.

That merchant mix makes an undifferentiated average especially difficult to interpret.

Clearly Payments’ commercial 2026 estimates place legal and accounting businesses at annual churn of approximately 5% to 10%, healthcare at 6% to 12%, specialty retail at 12% to 20% and restaurants at 25% to 45%. The figures are not authoritative benchmarks, but they illustrate how strongly portfolio composition can influence an aggregate result.

Suppose one processor works mainly with legal practices and another concentrates on restaurants. The first could report far lower attrition even if both provided identical service, simply because law firms and restaurants have different closure rates, ownership changes, technology needs and switching patterns.

Gravity does not publish its customer distribution by industry. It also does not show whether its comparison adjusts for merchant age, size, location, processing volume or vertical.

Without that adjustment, “half the industry average” may compare unlike portfolios.

Business closures can look like processor churn

Not every lost merchant leaves because of price or service.

BLS establishment-survival data show that 77.1% of businesses born in the Pacific census division in 2022 survived their first year. The corresponding rate was 74.4% in the Mountain division. Washington and Hawaii sit within the Pacific division, while Idaho is part of the Mountain division, covering the three regions most closely associated with Gravity’s offices.

The inverse figures are 22.9% and 25.6%. In other words, roughly one-quarter of those new establishments were no longer operating after one year, although the BLS measure covers all private establishments rather than Gravity merchants.

This is not a processor-retention benchmark. It demonstrates why merchant attrition must separate business failure from competitive switching.

A processor serving younger businesses could lose accounts even when those merchants were satisfied. A portfolio dominated by established medical, legal or property-service companies might appear unusually stable without any superior retention effort.

Gravity does not disclose how much of its attrition comes from closures, sales of businesses, ownership changes, risk termination, non-use or movement to competitors.

Why customer service could support the claim

Gravity says it provides 24-hour multilingual support with an average wait time of 36 seconds. The company also publishes merchant testimonials emphasizing communication, personal representatives and assistance during equipment problems. Both the wait-time result and the testimonials appear on Gravity-controlled pages rather than in an independent service audit.

Responsive support is economically relevant to small merchants.

The Federal Reserve Banks’ 2024 Report on Payments: Findings from the 2023 Small Business Credit Survey found that roughly four out of five small firms experienced payment-related challenges. Fees were the most common problem among businesses collecting payment at the point of sale, while firms relying on third parties more often cited slow processes and delays in settlement or funds availability.

Retail and leisure-and-hospitality businesses were particularly likely to accept cards and report processing-fee problems. Professional services, real estate and manufacturing firms were more likely to identify slow-paying customers as a challenge.

A processor that resolves equipment, settlement and billing issues quickly could reduce voluntary churn. Gravity’s 36-second figure supplies a specific operational claim, but the company does not state the measurement period, number of calls, excluded calls or whether the average covers all support channels.

The mechanism is credible. The result remains unaudited.

Customer-base growth does not prove customer retention

Gravity says the total number of businesses using its services doubled. A growing customer count can result from strong retention, successful sales, acquisitions, new products or some combination of all four.

The company expanded through the 2017 acquisition of Charge-it-Pro in Boise. It later introduced Gravity Legal, Portals and Poppy Bridal, adding new ways for businesses to enter its product ecosystem. Gravity also says its financing operations have served more than 1,000 businesses.

Those developments complicate a simple before-and-after customer count.

If Gravity started with 5,000 merchants, lost 500 each year and added 1,000 each year, the customer base could grow despite substantial churn. A second company with no net growth might retain nearly every existing merchant but add few new accounts.

Net customer growth is not gross retention.

Gravity would need to publish beginning merchants, new merchants, lost merchants and ending merchants for each year to show how much of the doubling came from retention.

Where the headline number misleads

The phrase “more than twice as long as the industry average” suggests a precise external comparison. Gravity gives no named report, year, merchant segment or calculation.

Its second formulation, attrition below half the industry average, appears to reinforce the first. Under a constant-churn model, the two statements should produce similar results. Real portfolios rarely follow a constant model because customer age, industry, sales channel and processing volume change over time.

The company’s broad product expansion creates another ambiguity. A merchant that stops using standalone processing but moves to an integrated Gravity platform might be counted as retained, migrated or lost depending on the internal definition.

My assessment is limited: Gravity probably has lower merchant attrition than many processors, given its reported referral activity, support model and decade of customer-base growth. Public evidence cannot establish that the rate is less than half the proper industry benchmark.

What would make the claim verifiable

A reproducible disclosure would require five elements:

1. Annual merchant count at the beginning and end of each year.
2. New accounts, closed accounts and inactive accounts reported separately.
3. Logo churn, revenue churn and processing-volume churn.
4. Results divided by merchant industry and account age.
5. A named external benchmark using the same definitions and period.

Gravity could also publish cohort tables showing what percentage of merchants added in 2015, 2018, 2021 and 2024 remained active after one, three, five and ten years.

No proprietary merchant names would be necessary.

Until that information appears, the retention claim belongs in the category of detailed company reporting rather than independently verifiable industry data.

FAQ

What customer-retention rate does Gravity Payments report?

Gravity does not publish a percentage. It says its attrition rate is less than half the industry average and customers remain more than twice as long, without identifying either underlying rate.

What is the average merchant-processing churn rate?

No single authoritative U.S. rate covers all processors and merchant types. Commercial sources commonly cite approximately 20%, while newer estimates range from below 10% for stable professional services to more than 40% in volatile sectors. Their methods and samples vary.

Has Gravity Payments doubled its customer base?

Gravity says the number of businesses using its services doubled during the decade covered by its 2025 report. It does not disclose the beginning or ending customer count.

Why might Gravity retain merchants longer?

The company points to referrals, personal account support and in-house customer service. It advertises an average support wait of 36 seconds, but no independent audit of that metric was found.

Does business failure count as merchant churn?

It may, depending on the processor’s definition. BLS data show that first-year business survival varies by region, so some account losses occur because merchants close rather than switch providers. Gravity does not publish a breakdown.

Does lower churn prove that Gravity offers lower prices?

No. The Federal Reserve’s small-business survey confirms that fees are a major payment challenge, but Gravity does not publish a standardized price comparison or data linking its pricing directly to retention.

Is Gravity’s retention claim false?

The available evidence does not show that. It shows that the claim cannot be independently reproduced because the company withholds the actual rate, merchant cohorts, definitions and named industry comparison.

Gravity may possess exceptional customer-retention data internally. Its public report supplies the conclusion while leaving out the figures needed to test it.