How to calculate MRR for App Store subscriptions from Apple's Subscription report

Monthly recurring revenue, for an app that sells subscriptions through the App Store, is what your active paid subscriptions earn you per month once every plan is put on a monthly footing. App Store Connect’s daily Subscription report holds every input. For each row:

MRR = Developer Proceeds × Active Standard Price Subscriptions ÷ plan length in months

Add the rows, converting currencies before you add across them, and that is the day’s MRR. The rest of this page is about which columns go into that line, and why.

Which columns in the Subscription report matter?

The report comes in a daily version only, and you can download it from Sales and Trends or through the App Store Connect API’s salesReports endpoint. One subscription usually fills several rows, broken out by columns such as country, price and proceeds rate. These are the columns that decide MRR, paraphrasing Apple’s definitions:

How do you turn each plan length into months?

30.4375 is the length of an average month (365.25 ÷ 12). Treating a month as four weeks instead understates weekly plans by about 8%.

A worked example

Made-up numbers for an app with a monthly plan and an annual plan, from one day’s report:

The 380 annual subscribers contribute more MRR than the 120 monthly ones, yet in a sales report they appear only as lumps on their renewal days. That gap is the reason MRR exists.

Four decisions that make two MRR numbers disagree

1. Proceeds or price. Customer Price is what the buyer paid, including Apple’s commission and, in many storefronts, tax. Developer Proceeds is what you are owed. Under Apple’s subscription terms you receive 70% of the price minus applicable taxes during a subscriber’s first year of paid service and 85% after that. Members of the Small Business Program receive 85% from the start. An MRR built on price overstates your income by the commission and any included tax.

2. Who counts as paying. Free trials are pipeline, not revenue. Introductory and promotional offers are the judgment call: they bring in money, but at a temporary price. Using only Active Standard Price Subscriptions gives the conservative figure, made of subscribers paying the standard price. Including discounted offers raises the number and makes it less stable.

3. Currency. Rows arrive in many proceeds currencies. Add per currency first, then convert. Apple’s availability notes say Sales and Trends estimates USD amounts from a rolling average of the previous month’s exchange rates. Other tools use other rates, so cross-currency totals can differ slightly even from identical inputs.

4. Time. MRR is a level, like a balance, not a flow like sales. For a week or a month, average the daily values; adding thirty days of MRR produces a number thirty times too large. Apple’s availability table also lists the Subscription report’s condition as at least one auto-renewable subscription sold, introductory prices included. When a day’s report isn’t there, treat that day as missing, not as zero.

Why doesn’t MRR match last month’s proceeds?

Sales reports record an annual renewal in full on the day it renews; MRR spreads it over twelve months. A month heavy with annual renewals shows proceeds well above MRR, and the quiet month after it shows them below. One-time purchases, paid-app sales and refunds land in proceeds and never in MRR.

The two sources also differ in finality. Apple describes Sales and Trends as next-day data and points to Payments and Financial Reports for final proceeds (Apple). Use MRR to read the direction of your subscriber base, and the financial reports to reconcile money.

Doesn’t App Store Connect show MRR now?

It does, in Analytics. The Subscriptions dashboard that Apple previewed at WWDC25 shows active plans, paid plans and monthly recurring revenue. Apple’s metric definitions describe MRR as “revenue earned from active paid subscriptions, normalized to a monthly timeframe.” The definition doesn’t say whether revenue means proceeds or price, which exchange rates apply, or how each plan length is normalized. If your own figure and Apple’s differ, the four decisions above are where to look.

In the same session Apple said two new subscription reports in the Analytics Reports API, a subscription state report and a subscription event report, will replace the older Sales and Trends subscription reports. The Sales and Trends Subscription report is still available through the API, and the formula doesn’t depend on which file the numbers arrive in.

When does each day’s report arrive?

Daily Sales and Trends reports are available the following day, generally by 8 a.m. Pacific Time (Apple), and a report day runs from midnight to 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time (Apple). Daily reports are kept for one year after they become available, so anyone building a long MRR history has to store the files as they arrive.

How AppMeta Pulse calculates it

AppMeta Pulse downloads the daily Subscription report through the App Store Connect API, using a key you create that stays in your Keychain. The API access page lists the endpoints it calls and the role the key needs. For each row, Pulse multiplies Developer Proceeds by Active Standard Price Subscriptions and divides by the number of months the plan covers: 1, 2, 3, 6 or 12. Trials are counted and shown on their own; they never enter MRR. Introductory and promotional offers stay out too, because the standard-price column already excludes them.

The totals are kept per proceeds currency. Conversion happens only when a number is shown, into the display currency you choose in Settings, using the European Central Bank’s monthly average rates.

Where the number appears:

• Subscriptions screen. MRR for the newest day Apple has published, next to active subscriptions and trials, plus a By Product list with one row per subscription and plan length, showing its MRR, active subscriptions and trials.
• Trends and the per-app view. MRR over a period is shown as an average (Avg MRR) across the days that have a report, compared with the previous period. Days without a report are skipped, not counted as zero.
• Widgets. The Subscriptions widget on the Home Screen and its Lock Screen counterpart show trials, active subscribers and MRR.

Pulse doesn’t forecast MRR or make Apple’s data arrive sooner. The newest day in the app is the newest day Apple has published, usually yesterday in Pacific Time. For why a quick revenue check belongs on the phone at all, see the earlier post on AppMeta Pulse; for how it differs from AppStats, App Sales and Appfigures, the comparison pages cover each one.

Whichever tool you use, write down its four decisions before comparing its MRR with anyone else’s. Two MRR figures rarely part ways over the formula.