NPS benchmarks by industry

A good Net Promoter Score depends on the industry. The clearest recent benchmark, Survicate’s 2025 dataset of 599 companies, 2,187 surveys and about 5.4 million responses, puts the median at 42 across industries: 65 in manufacturing, 61 in healthcare, 55 in retail and ecommerce, and 30 in software. B2C companies score a median of 49 and B2B companies 38.

Where the figures come from

Net Promoter Score was introduced by Fred Reichheld in the Harvard Business Review in 2003. The Net Promoter System site, run by Bain and Company, sets out the arithmetic: one question, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague, answered from 0 to 10, with promoters at 9 or 10, passives at 7 or 8 and detractors at 0 to 6. The score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, so it runs from minus 100 to plus 100. The same page’s only benchmark claim is that sustained value creators score twice the average company, without an industry breakdown.

Industry benchmarks therefore come from survey platforms, which see thousands of companies’ results. Survicate publishes the most explicit method of the ones that could be read on 21 October 2026: data from January to October 2025, only surveys with at least 100 responses, at least 50 companies per industry, and medians rather than averages. Medians are less affected by a few very high or very low scores.

The industry medians

The table under this article lists all eleven industries Survicate reports. Three patterns stand out.

Manufacturing and services lead. Manufacturing’s median of 65 and agency and consulting’s 59 come from businesses with fewer, longer customer relationships, where the person answering usually knows the account team.

Software and marketplaces trail. Software sits at 30 and digital marketplaces at 35. Both survey large numbers of users in product, many of whom have no strong feeling either way, which pushes answers into the passive and low detractor range.

Healthcare splits sharply. Healthcare’s overall median of 61 hides a B2C median of 70 and a B2B median of 38. Patients asked after a visit tend to be generous; the businesses buying healthcare services are not.

B2B against B2C

Across all industries B2C is 11 points higher, 49 against 38. The gap reverses in five industries: B2B scores higher in media (44 against 40) and digital marketplaces (39 against 27), and slightly higher in manufacturing, agency and consulting, and retail. The most likely reason is who answers. A consumer answers about their own experience. A business buyer answers on behalf of a team, about a contract, with the renewal price in mind.

What the benchmark does not tell you

Survicate’s page does not say whether its surveys were relationship surveys sent on a schedule or transactional surveys sent after an event, or which channels they ran through. That matters, because a score taken straight after a good support call will be higher than one taken in a quarterly email. No industry benchmark that could be read today separates the two, so this post cannot either. Other published round ups quote different numbers for the same industries; where those could not be traced to a page that states the method, they are not used here.

How the forms on this site ask it

Five of the 280 form examples on this site ask the 0 to 10 recommend question: the NPS survey, the customer feedback survey, an employee engagement survey, a post purchase survey and a product feedback survey. Three of them follow the score straight away with a question about the reason, and the NPS survey is the shortest form in the set at four questions. None asks the recommend question more than once, and none pairs it with a second 0 to 10 scale.

Using a benchmark well

1. Compare like with like: your industry, B2B or B2C, and the same survey type.
2. Collect at least 100 responses before comparing, the floor Survicate used.
3. Track your own score over time with the same question, timing and audience; that trend is more useful than any external median.
4. Read the reasons, not just the score. The follow up question is where the actions are.

The NPS survey best practices post covers timing and wording, how to calculate NPS works through the arithmetic on an export, and the NPS against CSAT page explains when to ask which. The free NPS calculator turns a count of answers into a score.

Why your own trend beats the benchmark

The industry medians are a sense check, not a target. A dental clinic scoring 55 sits below Survicate’s healthcare median of 61, but the comparison mixes clinics surveyed straight after a visit with providers surveyed by email months later, and B2C patients with B2B buyers. The clinic learns more from its own score each quarter, asked at the same point after the appointment, with the same wording, and from the reasons patients give.

Three habits make a trend trustworthy. Keep the question and the scale identical; a change from 0 to 10 to 1 to 10 breaks the series. Keep the timing identical; a survey sent on the day of a visit and one sent a month later measure different memories. And keep the audience identical; adding a new customer segment changes the score even if nothing improved. When you do compare with a published median, compare the same kind of customer, and say which benchmark and year you used.

Finally, look at the distribution, not just the score. Two businesses on 30 can look very different: one with many nines and tens and a handful of zeros, another with a wall of sevens and eights. The first has fans and a problem to fix; the second has nobody unhappy and nobody excited.

In the product

The recommend question is a single choice field with the options 0 to 10, in a classic or conversational form. Responses appear in a table and export to CSV with one column per field, the chosen option as its label, so the score is worked out in a spreadsheet; the forms themselves do not calculate it. The rating matrix page shows the other scale formats, and the guide to viewing and exporting responses shows how to get the CSV.