SimpleVerifier Team · Reviewed
What is a good email bounce rate?
Under 2% hard bounces per campaign is a sound target for most senders, and well under 1% is typical for a freshly verified list. Anything at or above 5% is in the zone where several platforms review or suspend accounts, so treat it as a list problem to fix before you send again.
How the rate is counted
Bounce rate is bounced messages divided by messages sent, and platforms differ on whether soft bounces count. Hard bounces (the address does not exist) are the ones that damage reputation; soft bounces (mailbox full, server busy) are retried. The bounce rate calculator works it out from your counts.
There is no universal benchmark published by Gmail or Yahoo for bounces. Their published limits are for spam complaints (see the spam complaint answer). The bounce lines that matter are the ones set by whoever carries your mail.
Related questions
- Do soft bounces count in the bounce rate?
- It depends on the platform. Most enforcement lines are about hard bounces; check the platform's own definition.
Sources
- Bounce limits by platform, read from each vendor's own docs (SimpleVerifier, 1 Oct 2026)
- Mailchimp: about bounces
Figures marked as ours come from SimpleVerifier’s own dated tests on made-up addresses, published with their data on the research page. No customer data is used, and we publish no accuracy percentage because we have no independent measurement to back one.
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