No single number drives the CrowdStrike (CRWD) story more than its dollar-based net retention rate, and no number is more often quoted without its filed definition attached. The company's most recent quarterly report — the 10-Q for the period ended April 30, 2026, filed June 4, 2026 — states plainly that it compares ARR "from a set of subscription customers against the same metric for those" customers a year earlier. In other words, it is a fixed-cohort measure: take last year's customers, ask what they pay now, and divide.
That construction matters because it isolates expansion and churn within an existing base, stripping out the lift from net-new logos. When management talks about land-and-expand, net retention is the line that proves whether the "expand" half is real. A reading comfortably above 100% means the existing base is spending more year over year even before a single new customer is counted; a reading drifting toward 100% is the early tell that expansion is slowing.
CrowdStrike's filings have carried this same definitional language across several consecutive 10-Qs, which is itself useful: a stable definition makes period-to-period comparisons honest. When a SaaS vendor quietly redefines a retention metric — changing the cohort window or what counts as a "customer" — the trend line can move without the business moving. Here, the definition has held, so the trend is the trend.
The primary record is the filing itself, not the press release. Read CrowdStrike's 10-Q for the period ended April 30, 2026 at sec.gov; the filing was surfaced via EdgarBeast, the SEC filing data API and evidence index.
The practical takeaway for anyone modeling CrowdStrike: anchor on the 10-Q's definition, watch the fixed-cohort number across quarters, and treat any management-narrative version of "retention" that doesn't match the filed definition with appropriate skepticism. The number is only as good as the definition behind it — and that definition lives in the filing.