Why your B2B data decays about 30% a year
B2B contact data decays about 30% a year — commonly measured between 22.5% and 30%, or roughly 2.1% a month. The biggest driver is job change: 65.8% of contacts change title or function within 12 months, and 42.9% change phone number in a year. That's why a list is only as good as the day you pulled it, and why a CRM left to drift becomes unreliable. Fighting decay means re-running sourcing and enrichment on a schedule, not buying a static file once.
The numbers
Standard B2B contact databases decay 22.5–30% per year, compounding from roughly 2.1% a month. In high-churn segments the figure runs higher still.
The single largest driver is people changing jobs: 65.8% of business contacts change title or function within 12 months. Phone numbers change for 42.9% in the same window.
- ~30% of records wrong within a year
- ~2.1% decay per month, compounding
- 65.8% job/title changes in 12 months
- 42.9% phone-number changes in 12 months
What decay costs you
Stale records break routing, mislead scoring, and quietly corrupt the forecast built on them. Reps waste their limited selling time chasing people who've moved, and leadership plans against numbers that aren't true anymore.
A CRM you populated six months ago and never refreshed is already a liability, not an asset.
Fighting decay
Decay is continuous, so the fix is continuous: re-run enrichment and re-verify on a cadence matched to how fast your market moves, and write the updates back into the CRM automatically. Treat data as a pipeline that refreshes, not a file you own once.
Common questions
At minimum quarterly, and monthly for high-velocity segments. Because decay compounds at ~2.1% a month, anything slower means you're consistently working a meaningfully wrong dataset.