NPS Benchmarks: What Is a Good Net Promoter Score?

NPS runs from -100 (every respondent is a detractor) to +100 (every respondent is a promoter). Because it subtracts detractors from promoters, the same score can come from very different distributions — which is why the range matters more than the exact number.

Treat these as rough guides, not hard grades. A score of 30 can be excellent in a low-scoring industry and mediocre in a high-scoring one. Calculate yours from raw counts with the NPS calculator.

As a general rule, any positive NPS means you have more promoters than detractors, a score above 30 is good, above 50 is excellent, and above 70 is world-class. But 'good' is always relative to three things: your industry, your survey method, and your own past scores.

Different industries cluster around very different NPS levels, for reasons that have little to do with how well any individual company performs:

• Category emotion — people feel warmly about some products and grudgingly about others, which shifts the whole industry's baseline up or down.
• Switching costs — in categories that are hard to leave, customers can be loyal yet unenthusiastic, producing more passives.
• Competition and expectations — mature, crowded markets raise expectations and compress scores.
• Frequency of interaction — a product used daily is judged differently from one touched once a year.
• Who answers — a survey sent to power users returns a different score than one sent to the whole base.

Because of this, comparing your NPS to a company in a different industry tells you almost nothing. Compare within your category, and even then treat published figures as directional. Avoid quoting precise 'industry average' numbers as fact — methods behind them are rarely disclosed.

Two companies can measure NPS honestly and get very different scores purely because of how they run the survey. For any comparison to be valid, the method has to match:

• Relationship vs transactional — relationship NPS (about the company overall) and transactional NPS (about one interaction) are different metrics and should never be compared to each other.
• Timing — asking right after a great experience inflates the score versus a periodic, cold survey.
• Channel — in-app, email and post-purchase surveys reach different customers and produce different scores.
• Sampling — surveying everyone versus only engaged users changes the mix of promoters and detractors.
• Response rate — a low response rate raises the risk that only the most enthusiastic or most angry customers answered.

The most useful benchmark you have is your own history. A rising NPS measured consistently means your changes are working; a falling one is an early warning — regardless of how you compare to an industry figure of uncertain provenance.

• Track the score on a fixed cadence (for example quarterly) so movements are real, not seasonal noise.
• Segment the trend by plan, region and tenure — an overall flat score can hide one segment improving and another collapsing.
• Watch the distribution, not just the headline: a stable NPS built from more promoters and more detractors is more polarized than it looks.
• Pair every score with the open-text 'why' so a change in the trend comes with an explanation you can act on.

To move the trend in the right direction, see how to improve NPS. To understand the group dragging it down, see detractor analysis.

A benchmark is only useful if it changes what you do. Use your score range to set a realistic target, then focus on the reasons behind the number rather than the number itself.

AI makes this practical at volume: it themes hundreds of open-text comments, flags sentiment and surfaces the specific issues pulling your score down — so you spend your time fixing drivers, not tallying scores. Describe your goal in AI Studio to build an NPS survey with the follow-ups that make benchmarking meaningful, or start from the NPS survey template.