The average contact data decay rate is roughly 22.5% per year (HubSpot), which means nearly one-quarter of your contact database goes bad every 12 months.
Contacts don't disappear. They change jobs, switch employers, update their email, or move. The record still sits in your CRM, so it looks reachable when it isn't. That's what "decay" means: not deletion, but drift.
How contact data decay compounds
Because the decay builds year over year, the damage adds up faster than most teams expect. Starting from a clean database:
- After 1 year: about 22.5% of your contacts are out of date.
- After 2 years: about 40% have gone bad, roughly two in five.
- After 3 years: more than half, about 53%.
- After 5 years: about 72%. Nearly three-quarters of the database you started with.
That's why a one-time cleanup doesn't hold. The data starts going stale the day after you finish. Keeping a database accurate means verifying contacts on an ongoing basis, not once.
Want to see what this is costing your organization? Use our free ROI calculator to estimate the revenue sitting in contacts you can no longer reach, or get a free analysis of 100 of your contacts.