Monthly Active Users (MAU)

MAU (monthly active users) is the number of unique users who were active in an app or on a website during a month, or during the last 30 days. MAU shows how big the base of people still using the product really is, which is different from total downloads or registered accounts.

What is MAU?

MAU counts each person once in a 30-day window, whether they used the product on 1 day or all 30. That is why you cannot add up daily DAU figures to get MAU: someone who uses the app 20 days in a month produces 20 DAU counts but only 1 MAU.

There are two ways to set the window:

• Rolling 30 days: calculated on any given day, looking back 30 days. GA4 uses this method for its DAU/MAU ratio (Google Analytics Help, accessed October 2026). App Store Connect has an Active in Last 30 Days metric, which counts devices with at least one session in the previous 30 days (Apple, accessed October 2026).
• Calendar month: from the 1st to the end of the month. This is easy to match against monthly revenue, but February is shorter than March, so the numbers never quite line up.

Your definition of “active” also has to match the one you use for DAU. Otherwise the DAU/MAU ratio will be wrong.

MAU in financial reporting and law

MAU used to be the number every social network published. Meta’s Q4 2023 earnings release still reported 3.07 billion Facebook MAU and 3.98 billion MAP (monthly active people, counted across its apps) (Meta, February 2024). The Q2 2026 release has no monthly metric at all. It keeps only DAP, daily active people (Meta, July 2026).

In Europe, MAU has legal consequences. The Digital Services Act requires online platforms to publish their average monthly active recipients of the service in the EU, averaged over 6 months, first by February 17, 2023 at the latest and at least every 6 months after that. Platforms with 45 million or more, about 10% of the EU population, can be designated by the European Commission as very large online platforms with heavier obligations (EUR-Lex, Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, October 2022). The law counts broadly: viewing or hearing content on the platform at least once in the period is enough.

How to calculate MAU and related ratios

MAU = Number of unique users who took an “active” action in the last 30 days (or in the month)

• DAU/MAU: stickiness, or how many days in the month users come back.
• WAU/MAU: also built into GA4, and a good fit for apps used weekly, such as online grocery.
• Monthly revenue / MAU: this is monthly ARPU.

Example: MAU goes up but the app gets no stickier (hypothetical)

A spa booking app in Ho Chi Minh City has 40,000 MAU in September, an average DAU of 4,000, and a DAU/MAU ratio of 10%. In October it runs app install ads. MAU rises to 46,000, but average DAU stays at 4,000, so the ratio falls to about 8.7%.

The ads brought in more people, but the new users open the app less often than the existing ones. The next step is to check how many new users come back after 7 and 30 days, before raising the budget.

MAU vs. downloads vs. registered accounts

FAQ

Should I report MAU on a rolling 30 days or by calendar month?

Product teams usually use rolling 30 days internally because it can be checked every day. Reports to leadership or investors usually use calendar months to match revenue. State the method clearly and keep it the same from period to period.

What if MAU grows but revenue stays flat?

Either the new users are not paying yet, or the paying group has not changed. Look at ARPU and ARPPU together to see whether the problem is the number of payers or the amount each payer spends.

If you want to set app growth targets around MAU and paying users instead of installs, take a look at Adtek’s App User Acquisition solution or contact Adtek.