How much does the average person waste on forgotten subscriptions per year?

A 2026 JustCancel survey put the national average at $384/year. A separate 2025 CNET survey estimated $204/year. Treat both as benchmarks for context rather than precise targets — the only number that matters for your own finances is your own list.

How common is it to forget about a subscription?

Surveys suggest roughly 70% of people have forgotten to cancel a free trial that later converted to a paid subscription at some point. It's a near-universal experience, not an unusual lapse.

What's the best way to find forgotten subscriptions?

Pull up at least 12 months of bank or credit card statements and scan every recurring charge line by line, rather than relying on memory. Most people find at least one subscription they'd genuinely forgotten was still active.

Is it worth cancelling a $5-10/month subscription I barely use?

Over a year, even a $7.99/month subscription is $95.88 — and if it's been running unnoticed for 8 months already, that's $63.92 already spent for nothing. The size of any single charge looks small; the accumulated total across several forgotten items usually doesn't.

The Average Household Wastes $384/Year on Subscriptions Nobody Remembers Signing Up For

Two specific charges, pulled from an actual statement review: a $14.99/month fitness app that ran for 8 months after the free trial ended, and a $9.99/month cloud VPN trial that ran for 5 months before being noticed. Neither charge alone looks alarming. Added together, they came to $169.87 — below the published national average, and still money that bought nothing.

What “forgotten” actually costs, line by line

Item	Monthly price	Months before noticed	Wasted cost
Fitness app (free trial → paid)	$14.99	8	$119.92
Cloud VPN trial	$9.99	5	$49.95
Total			$169.87

$169.87 sits below both published national averages — $384/year (JustCancel, 2026) and $204/year (CNET, 2025) — but it’s still two subscriptions that delivered zero value during the months they were charging. The averages exist to give the number context, not to set a bar that makes a smaller total feel fine.

Why this happens to almost everyone

This isn’t a story about carelessness. Roughly 70% of people report having forgotten to cancel a free trial that quietly converted to a paid subscription. Free trials are specifically designed to require an active cancellation step rather than defaulting to “does nothing unless renewed” — the friction is the business model, not an accident.

Where this calculation doesn’t apply

You already cancel promptly. If you don’t have specific forgotten charges to list, the national-average figure is just context — there’s nothing to run the calculator against.
The subscription still gets occasional use. “Forgotten” here means genuinely unused. Something you open once a month is a low-value subscription worth reconsidering on its own terms, not a pure-waste calculation.
You’re trying to prevent future waste, not measure past waste. This kind of accounting only totals confirmed past charges. The actual fix for future free trials is a calendar reminder set at signup, not a retrospective calculation.
Annual billing cycles. The math here assumes monthly charges. For an annual subscription forgotten through one renewal, treat the whole annual charge as a single “month” for a rough equivalent.

What to actually do

Pull up 12 months of bank or card statements and go through every recurring charge, not just the ones you remember.
For each unfamiliar or unused one, note the monthly price and roughly how long it’s likely been running unused.
Cancel what you’ve confirmed you don’t want — most services allow this online in under two minutes now, following consumer-protection rules that require easy cancellation.
Set a recurring quarterly reminder to repeat the statement scan. New forgotten charges accumulate the same way the old ones did.

Once you’ve found what’s been quietly running, the Subscription Audit tool totals every current recurring charge — not just forgotten ones — and if streaming specifically is a recurring source of quiet waste, Streaming Rotation Strategy covers subscribing only for the months you’d actually watch.

Open the Forgotten Subscription Cost Calculator → and total what you’ve found on your own statements.