Monthly Active Users (MAU)
Unique users who engage with your product at least once in a month.
What it measures
The size of your active user base over a month. MAU is the standard denominator for reach and the base for the DAU/MAU stickiness ratio, but says nothing about engagement depth.
Calculation Variants
- Rolling 30-Day (L30D)
- Re-calculated daily looking back 30 days. The best method for operational tracking as it smooths out month-length variations and weekend dips.
- Calendar Month
- Calculated from the 1st to the last day of the month. Best for board reporting and financial alignment.
What to watch
- Rising: Your reach is growing. But MAU counts a user who showed up once the same as a daily power user, so confirm the growth is engaged by checking DAU/MAU stickiness and retention curves alongside it.
- Falling: Either acquisition slowed or existing users are lapsing. Decompose with growth accounting (new vs. resurrected vs. churned) to tell a top-of-funnel problem from a retention problem.
When NOT to use
For high-frequency products where daily habit is the goal, DAU is the more honest headline—MAU can look healthy while daily engagement quietly erodes. For deliberately infrequent products (tax software, travel booking), monthly counts swing with seasonality and an annual metric is often better.
In practice
A B2B tool celebrated MAU climbing past 50,000, but DAU/MAU stickiness was stuck at 8%—most "monthly active" users logged in once and never returned that month. The team reframed their North Star from MAU to weekly active users who completed a core action, which exposed that real engaged usage was a fraction of the headline number.
Illustrative scenario — a representative composite, not a specific company.
Vanity Risk
MAU is the textbook vanity metric: it grows with any one-time visit and never falls as long as acquisition outruns lapse. Never report MAU without a stickiness or retention companion.
Related: DAU — the daily counterpart; MAU is the monthly denominator, DAU the daily numerator.; DAU/MAU Stickiness — MAU is the denominator; the ratio is what turns a raw reach count into a habit signal.; Growth Accounting — decomposes MAU change into new, resurrected, retained, and churned users.