Free tool

Bounce rate calculator

What a dirty list really costs you, in money and reputation. Adjust the numbers and watch the result update.

List sizecontactsContacts you send to in a typical campaign.Estimated invalid addresses%Lists older than a year typically run 8 to 20%.Sends per monthsendsSending cost per 1,000 emails$Your ESP's effective rate, overage or plan tier.Value of one delivered email$Revenue per email delivered, from your own reporting.

Your numbers

2,000addresses will bounce per send

8% bounce ratethreshold 2%

Wasted sending cost, per send: $3.00
Wasted sending cost, per year: $144
Revenue lost to bounces, per year: $11,520
One-off clean with Verifyre: $65.00 (0.0026/address)
Pays for itself in: the first send

At 8% your bounce rate is above the 2% line where Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook start throttling. Clean before the next send.

Reputation damage is not in these numbers: once a provider throttles you, even your good addresses stop seeing mail.

Clean 25,000 addresses See pricing

About this tool

How bounce rate is calculated

Bounce rate is the share of messages in a send that could not be delivered: bounces divided by messages sent, as a percentage. Hard bounces are permanent (the mailbox does not exist, the domain has no mail servers), soft bounces are temporary (mailbox full, server busy). Mailbox providers and email service providers watch the hard-bounce share closely because it is the clearest sign of a list that was bought, scraped or left to rot. Around 2% is the commonly cited line: above it, Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook begin to throttle or junk-folder mail from the sending domain, and many ESPs pause the account.

What the calculator estimates

Enter your list size and your best estimate of the invalid share. Lists under a year old that were collected with validation often sit at 2 to 5%; older lists, imported lists and anything with a free-download form on it typically run 8 to 20%, because around 22% of addresses go stale every year as people change jobs and providers. The calculator turns that share into the number of addresses that will bounce per send, your projected bounce rate against the 2% line, the sending fees wasted on messages that cannot arrive (per send and per year, from your sends per month and cost per thousand), and the revenue those bounced messages would have generated if they had reached a real inbox. Against that it sets the cost of a one-off clean at the public pack rate for a list that size, and the number of sends after which the clean has paid for itself. For most lists the answer is the first send.

What the numbers leave out

Reputation damage. Once a provider throttles your domain, your good addresses stop seeing mail too, and recovering takes weeks of careful warm-up. Also left out: the time your team spends on list hygiene by hand, the inflated plan tier you pay your ESP for contacts who cannot be reached, and the analytics that are quietly wrong because a share of your audience never existed. If the calculator says you are near the line, run the list through the bulk verifier before the next send, and put real-time validation on the forms that feed it.

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