Email bounce rate benchmarks
Bounce rate is the share of your sent messages that bounced, but every platform counts it a little differently, so a "normal" rate depends on whose numbers you read. Few email platforms publish bounce benchmarks at all, and the ones that do describe their own customers in their own way: the figures below are each publisher's data and do not compare across publishers. The numbers that matter more are the limits your sending platform enforces. Amazon SES, for example, places an account under review at a 5% bounce rate, while Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook.com publish no bounce-rate number at all.
What bounce rate measures
The basic formula is bounces divided by messages sent, over some period (glossary: bounce rate). Three choices change the result:
- Which bounces count. Some platforms count only hard bounces, permanent failures such as a mailbox that does not exist. Others count soft bounces too.
- The base. Messages sent, messages attempted, or a sample the platform considers typical for you.
- The window. One campaign, the last 30 days, or a calendar month.
How five platforms describe their own metric:
| Platform | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Amazon SES | Hard bounces only, measured over a "representative volume" that differs per account. Soft bounces, mail to your own verified addresses and domains, and mail to the SES inbox simulator are left out (AWS). |
| HubSpot | The email health tool shows the percentage of your emails that hard bounced in the past 30 days, without the last 48 hours (HubSpot). |
| Klaviyo | Bounced emails divided by the total number of emails sent, ideally over the last 30 days (Klaviyo). |
| Postmark | Bounce events that its activity pages highlight in red, as a share of all emails sent; some event types, such as Sandbox server bounces, are excluded (Postmark). |
| Mailchimp | Campaign reports count recipients who hard or soft bounced, and "successful deliveries" are the recipients who did not (Mailchimp). |
So a send with 3% soft bounces and 1% hard bounces is about a 1% bounce rate in SES terms and closer to 4% wherever soft bounces count. Know which definition your dashboard uses before you compare it with anything. For how the two kinds of failure reach you and how to classify them, see bounce processing and DSNs.
Published benchmark figures
GetResponse
GetResponse's Email Marketing Benchmarks report (2024 edition) analyzed more than 4.4 billion messages that its customers sent in 2023, limited to active senders with at least 500 contacts. Its FAQ gives an average bounce rate of 2.33%, which matches the total row of its table by continent; the total row of its table by industry shows 2.79%. A few industry rows:
| Industry (GetResponse, 2023 data) | Bounce rate |
|---|---|
| Real Estate | 4.86% |
| Automotive | 4.31% |
| Financial Services | 1.79% |
| Communications | 1.19% |
The report does not define how it counts a bounce.
Omnisend
Omnisend's support article Getting started with deliverability gives an average bounce rate of about 0.3%. It does not say what data that average comes from.
Benchmark pages without bounce figures
When we checked in November 2026, several well-known benchmark pages published engagement rates but no bounce rates:
- Mailchimp's Email Marketing Benchmarks says it calculated soft and hard bounce rates by industry, from campaigns sent to at least 1,000 subscribers, but its table shows only open, click and unsubscribe rates. The data was last updated in December 2023.
- MailerLite's benchmarks cover over 3.6 million campaigns from 181,000 approved accounts, December 2024 to November 2025, reported as medians: open, click, click-to-open and unsubscribe rates, no bounce rate.
- Campaign Monitor's benchmarks, based on emails sent across its platforms in 2021, also stop at engagement metrics.
Why these figures do not compare
GetResponse's 2.33% and Omnisend's 0.3% are not evidence that one platform's customers clean their lists better. The publishers differ in who their customers are, possibly in which bounces they count (neither says), in whether they report an average or a median, in which small lists they leave out (500 contacts for GetResponse, 1,000 subscribers for Mailchimp), and in which year they measured. Even within one GetResponse report the two total rows differ. Use a benchmark to see whether your number is in a plausible range, not as a target.
Limits that platforms enforce
These are the published rules that can stop your sending, which a benchmark cannot:
| Platform | Published level | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon SES | Keep hard bounces below 5% | At 5% or more the account is automatically placed under review; at 10% or more SES may pause sending until the cause is fixed. Complaint rates have their own lines: 0.1% for review, 0.5% for a possible pause. |
| HubSpot | Hard bounce rate of 5% in a month | Marketing email may be suspended, together with limits of 0.1% for spam reports and 3% for unsubscribes. A lower stage, probation, uses thresholds that depend on your industry's sending volume, with no figure published. |
| Postmark | Bounce rate lower than 10% of all emails sent | Accounts that do not meet its sending qualifications are contacted by email and paused, with messages queued, until the problem is resolved. |
| Mailchimp | No number | Mailchimp says mailbox providers set limits it must enforce, that these vary and are not public, and that rates that are too high can lead to a warning or suspension. |
Klaviyo publishes targets rather than an enforcement line: below 1.0% is healthy, 1% to 2% leaves room for improvement, and above 2% needs attention (Klaviyo).
Treat an enforcement limit as a ceiling, never as a goal. A 4% hard bounce rate is under the SES review line and still twice Klaviyo's "needs attention" mark.
What mailbox providers say
None of the large mailbox providers publishes a bounce-rate threshold. Their numbers concern spam complaints:
- Gmail. Google's email sender guidelines ask senders to keep the spam rate in Postmaster Tools below 0.3% (ideally below 0.1%). On bounces they give instructions, not numbers: automatically unsubscribe recipients with multiple bounced messages, and lower the sending volume when messages start bouncing or being deferred (Google Postmaster Tools).
- Yahoo. Yahoo's sender best practices also set a spam rate below 0.3%, and ask senders to monitor hard and soft bounces and remove invalid recipients promptly.
- Outlook.com. Microsoft's requirements for high-volume senders apply to domains sending more than 5,000 emails a day. They recommend removing invalid addresses regularly, monthly or quarterly, without a bounce-rate figure.
The M3AAWG Sender Best Common Practices (version 4.0, August 2026) explain why bounces still count: receivers use the volume of permanent failures as one input to a sender's reputation, and large volumes of them too often point to a poorly managed sign-up process or an old or misapplied list. More on that in sender reputation.
Using benchmarks well
- Compare with yourself first. Your own rate per campaign, per sign-up source and per list segment tells you more than any industry average.
- Split by mailbox provider. M3AAWG recommends looking at bounce rates per provider, because a jump at one provider can point to authentication failures, missing reverse DNS, connection limits or a blocklisting (email blocklists).
- Keep hard and soft apart. Suppress hard bounces at once. M3AAWG suggests removing an address that bounces on at least two consecutive sends over two weeks or more.
- Verify stale segments and imports. Mailchimp names stale audiences and wrongly entered or imported addresses as common causes of high bounce rates. Run old segments and imports through verification first and remove results with the action
remove, such asno_mailbox(reduce your bounce rate; per platform: Mailchimp, HubSpot, Klaviyo, Brevo). - Retire the unengaged. A sunset policy removes addresses before they turn into bounces or recycled traps (re-engagement and sunset policies).
Verification lowers hard bounces; it does not remove them all. It cannot confirm mailboxes on catch-all domains, and a mailbox can close between the check and the send, so keep processing bounces as well.
Questions
What is a good email bounce rate?
No single published number applies to everyone. As a reference, Klaviyo calls below 1% healthy, while Amazon SES and HubSpot act at 5% hard bounces. Aim for hard bounces close to zero and look into any rise from your own baseline.
Why does my platform show a different rate from my own count?
Its definition likely differs from yours: hard bounces only or all bounces, sent or a representative sample, and a rolling window such as 30 days. Amazon SES, for example, ignores soft bounces entirely.
Do Gmail or Yahoo block senders above a certain bounce rate?
Neither publishes a bounce-rate limit. Both publish a spam-rate limit of 0.3%, and both ask senders to stop mailing addresses that bounce (Gmail and Yahoo sender requirements).
Try it
Check a segment before you send it with bulk email verification, or test a single address in the free email checker.
Related
- Glossary: hard bounce and soft bounce.
- Bounce code 550 5.1.1: the mailbox does not exist.
- The invalid status and its reasons.
Related guides
- Reduce your email bounce rate
- Bounce processing and DSNs explained
- How to clean an email list
- Sender reputation explained
- Re-engagement campaigns and sunset policies
- All guides
Sources
- AWS: Reputation metrics messages (Amazon SES): how SES counts bounces, the 5% review and 10% pause levels, complaint levels.
- HubSpot: Resolve email sending suspensions: the monthly 5% hard bounce limit and its companion limits.
- HubSpot: Resolve an email sending probation: industry-dependent probation thresholds.
- HubSpot: Monitor email sending reputation with the email health tool: 30-day hard bounce measure.
- Klaviyo: Getting started with email deliverability monitoring and performance metrics: definition and target bands.
- Postmark: Does Postmark have a daily send limit?: the 10% bounce qualification and what counts.
- Mailchimp: About bounces: limits set by providers, warnings and suspension.
- Mailchimp: About email campaign reports: bounced and successful deliveries.
- Mailchimp: Email Marketing Benchmarks: methodology and the metrics published.
- GetResponse: Email Marketing Benchmarks: bounce rates for 2023 by industry and continent.
- Omnisend: Getting started with deliverability: average bounce rate figure.
- MailerLite: Email marketing benchmarks: data scope and metrics published.
- Campaign Monitor: Email marketing benchmarks: metrics published.
- Google: Email sender guidelines: spam-rate limits and bounce handling.
- Yahoo: Sender best practices: bounce monitoring and removal.
- Microsoft Tech Community: Outlook's new requirements for high-volume senders: list hygiene recommendations.
- M3AAWG: Sender Best Common Practices, version 4.0: bounces and reputation, per-provider monitoring, removal after repeated bounces.
How we wrote this: drafted by the email-validation.org team with the help of AI writing tools, from our product documentation and the sources linked in the text.