What Is a Good Email Bounce Rate?
“Good” depends on your list, your industry, and who you ask — we'd rather point you to a source with real numbers than make one up. What matters more than any single threshold is understanding what bounce rate measures and which direction yours is moving.
What it actually measures
Bounce rate is the share of a campaign that could not be delivered. A hard bounce means the address does not exist, or the domain does not accept mail at all — this is permanent, and it is the number verification is aimed at reducing before you send. A soft bounce is temporary — a full inbox, a server that was briefly down — and usually clears on its own.
Why mailbox providers care
A hard bounce tells Gmail, Outlook, and every other mailbox provider that you sent to an address that should not have been on your list in the first place. It is treated as a signal about how carefully you manage your list, not just a failed send. Enough of them, and it stops being about that one address — inbox placement drops for your whole list, including the subscribers who were always going to open, click, and buy.
When to act
The number that matters most is not an absolute threshold but the trend on your own list. A bounce rate that creeps up campaign over campaign, especially on a list you have not mailed in a while, is the clearest sign that it has decayed since people last engaged with it. That is the point to verify before your next send, not after you have already taken the reputation hit.
Finding a number for your industry
Bounce-rate benchmarks vary by industry, list source, and sending frequency, and the most reliable ones come from deliverability platforms and email service providers who publish their own send data. Check what your ESP reports for accounts like yours before setting a target — that will be more accurate than a single generic figure.
Lower it before your next send
Verify your list once and cut the hard bounces out before they count against you. See our full list-cleaning checklist for the steps around it.