---
title: What is Time to churn?
url: https://markin.ai/glossary/time-to-churn
category: Retention and churn
---

# Time to churn

> Time to churn is the expected remaining tenure of a customer, derived from a survival model rather than a binary risk score. It converts risk into a schedule, telling a system how urgent an intervention is and how long it has to work.

## Why it matters for ARPU

Two customers with identical risk scores can need opposite treatments if one is leaving next week and the other next quarter. Urgency is what makes retention budgets efficient.

## Related terms

- [Survival analysis](https://markin.ai/glossary/survival-analysis), Survival analysis models time until an event, handling customers who have not churned yet as censored rather than discarding them.
- [Churn prediction](https://markin.ai/glossary/churn-prediction), Churn prediction estimates the probability that a given customer will stop paying within a defined horizon, using behavioural, transactional and service signals.
- [Retention curve](https://markin.ai/glossary/retention-curve), A retention curve plots the share of a cohort still active against time since acquisition.
- [Arbitration](https://markin.ai/glossary/arbitration), Arbitration is the step that resolves competing candidate actions for the same customer into one decision, ranking them by expected value under constraints such as contact limits, budget, fairness and business priority.

## Go deeper

- [Customer churn prediction guide](https://markin.ai/blog/customer-churn-prediction-guide), From score to schedule.
- [Real-time decisioning](https://markin.ai/solutions/customer-decisioning), Acting on urgency.

Source: https://markin.ai/glossary/time-to-churn