What is a good email bounce rate?

What is the difference between a hard and a soft bounce?

A hard bounce is a permanent failure and a soft bounce is a temporary one. Mailchimp describes a hard bounce as "a permanent reason an email can't be delivered", such as an address that doesn't exist, and a soft bounce as "a temporary delivery issue", such as a full mailbox (Mailchimp, Soft vs. Hard Bounces).

The two are handled differently:

• Hard bounces are usually removed at once. Mailchimp says hard-bounced addresses are, in most cases, "cleaned from your audience automatically and immediately". SES tells senders to "remove bounced addresses from your mailing list and stop sending mail to them immediately" (Amazon SES).
• Soft bounces are retried, and repeated ones turn into hard bounces. Mailchimp allows 7 soft bounces for an address with no subscriber activity, and up to 15 for contacts with earlier activity, before it treats the address as a hard bounce.

Your bounce rate is bounced emails divided by emails sent. Check which bounces your platform counts. SES, for example, counts only hard bounces to domains you haven't verified.

Published bounce-rate benchmarks

Published benchmarks come from sending platforms, each measuring its own customers' mail. Each platform measures differently, so expect a range.

Platform limits (Amazon SES). SES advises a bounce rate below 2%. At 5% or more it places the account under review, and at 10% or more it may pause the account's sending (Amazon SES, accessed 3 October 2026).

Averages by industry (GetResponse). GetResponse's benchmarks report, updated for 2024, covers more than 4.4 billion messages its customers sent in 2023. It doesn't split hard and soft bounces.

Source: GetResponse, Email Marketing Benchmarks, accessed 3 October 2026. The same report's summary gives an overall average of 2.33%, which differs from its industry table.

These averages come from each platform's own customers, whose lists and sending habits vary. We found no public benchmark for cold mail to business contacts, so treat the platform limits as the line that matters.

Why older lists bounce more

Addresses stop working as people change jobs, practices close and domains lapse, so the longer a list sits, the more it bounces. ZeroBounce, an email verification company, found that at least 23% of the email addresses it checked in 2025 were invalid and risky, down from 28% in 2024. It processed more than 11 billion addresses that year (ZeroBounce, Email List Decay Report for 2026).

The registers that many business lists are built from show the same problem. In the CMS NPPES file of 2026-09-14:

Providers rarely update their records, so a list copied straight from the register carries contact details that may be a decade old. Emails for such a list have to come from somewhere current, such as the practice's own website, and be checked before you send. The exact figures are in dentists-register-2026-10.csv and physicians-register-2026-10.csv.

What these numbers don't show. Record age measures when a register entry last changed, not whether the office's email works. An old record can describe an open practice, and a recently updated one can have a dead inbox.

How to keep your bounce rate low

Check every address before a campaign and send in stages, so a bad segment shows up in a small batch instead of your whole list.

1. Verify before you send. A check with the recipient's mail server finds addresses that no longer exist. Recheck any list that has sat for more than a few weeks.
2. Split by status. Send to confirmed addresses first. Domains that accept every address can't be confirmed, so send to them separately in small batches. Our guide to catch-all emails explains why.
3. Start small. Send a few hundred emails, check the bounce rate, then continue. Stop and clean the list if one batch bounces far above the rest.
4. Remove hard bounces at once. Never resend to an address that hard-bounced.
5. Compare bounce rates across campaigns. A rate that rises from one campaign to the next means the list is ageing faster than you clean it.
6. Ask your list seller for dates. A per-row "last verified" date tells you how fresh each address is. A list-level "updated" date doesn't.

How the nodilist bounce guarantee works

Each email in a nodilist file will carry a status (valid, catch-all or unknown) and the date we last verified it. The guarantee covers the emails marked valid.

If more than 5% of the emails we mark valid hard-bounce within 30 days, we refund that share of your order. Catch-all and unknown emails will be labelled separately and don't count toward the 5%. Card held at checkout, charged on delivery. The conditions are on the refunds and guarantee page.

What this guide can't tell you

• What your own bounce rate will be. It depends on the list, its age, your sending platform and your sending pattern.
• Whether these benchmarks fit cold B2B email. The published averages come from platforms' own customers, and we found no public figure for cold email.
• Your platform's exact rules. Limits change, and each platform counts bounces its own way. Check its terms before you import a list.