Promoter, Passive & Detractor Glossary — NPS Terms Explained

July 14, 2026

The Three NPS Response Bands

Every Net Promoter Score starts with one survey question: “How likely is it that you would recommend [company/product] to a friend or colleague?” Respondents answer on an 11-point scale from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). Bain & Company, the firm that developed NPS, sorts every response into exactly one of three bands based on that single number.

Band	Score Range	What It Means
Detractor	0–6	Unhappy customer, unlikely to buy again, risk of negative word-of-mouth
Passive	7–8	Satisfied but unenthusiastic, won’t actively promote or harm the brand
Promoter	9–10	Loyal enthusiast, likely to keep buying and refer others

These bands are fixed by the official methodology — a 7 is always a Passive and a 9 is always a Promoter, regardless of industry or survey tool. That consistency is what makes NPS comparable across companies and time periods.

Promoters (9–10)

Promoters are respondents who answer 9 or 10. Bain and later researchers at Qualtrics describe this group as customers who are loyal enthusiasts — people who keep buying, try new products from the same company, and refer friends and colleagues without being asked. In most businesses, Promoters generate a disproportionate share of referrals and repeat revenue relative to their share of the customer base, which is the core reason Reichheld proposed tracking them as a growth indicator in his original 2003 Harvard Business Review article.

Passives (7–8)

Passives answer 7 or 8. They are satisfied — they wouldn’t leave a bad review — but they are not enthusiastic enough to actively recommend the company, and they will switch to a competitor without much hesitation if a better offer appears. Passives count toward your total response base (they affect your percentages) but are deliberately left out of the NPS subtraction itself. The reasoning: NPS is designed to measure the gap between active promotion and active detraction, not overall satisfaction, so neutral responses are excluded from the core formula.

Detractors (0–6)

Detractors cover the widest range of the scale, from 0 through 6. This is intentional — Bain’s research found that even a “6” correlates with churn risk and negative word-of-mouth, so lumping 0–6 together avoids treating a mediocre score as if it were meaningfully positive. Detractors are the group most worth following up with directly, since their open-ended feedback usually points to specific, fixable problems.

Why the Bands Aren’t Evenly Split

Notice the scale isn’t divided into even thirds. Detractors span 7 points (0–6), Passives span 2 points (7–8), and Promoters span 2 points (9–10). This asymmetry reflects how people actually use a 0–10 recommendation scale: respondents tend to reserve 9 and 10 for genuine enthusiasm, while a “6” or “7” from most people signals real reservations even though it feels like a “passing grade” on a school-style scale. Treating a 6 as a Detractor — rather than a middling neutral score — is one of the more counterintuitive parts of NPS for people new to the metric.

Turning the Bands Into a Score

Once every response is sorted, the formula is:

NPS = % Promoters − % Detractors

Passives affect the denominator (they’re part of total responses) but never appear in the subtraction. For example, out of 100 responses with 60 Promoters, 25 Passives, and 15 Detractors: 60% − 15% = an NPS of 45. Plug your own response counts — or a raw list of 0–10 ratings — into the NPS calculator to get the split and score automatically.

See how these bands translate into real-world scores across sectors in NPS industry benchmarks by sector
Learn how to word your survey question and size your sample correctly in how to run an NPS survey and interpret your score
See the band definitions applied to five different response mixes in NPS calculation examples for different response distributions