ARPDAU is the daily-active-user variant of ARPU and the standard monetization metric in free-to-play gaming. The formula: total revenue in a period ÷ average DAU in that period. A game earning $30,000 over 30 days with 10,000 average DAU has $30,000 ÷ 30 ÷ 10,000 = $0.10 ARPDAU. The unit reads as "dollars per active user per day."
The reason F2P games use ARPDAU instead of monthly ARPU: in a daily-engagement product, daily user counts move dramatically (a Sunday spike, a weekday dip, a campaign-driven push). Monthly ARPU averages over those swings and hides what's actually happening. ARPDAU normalizes by daily presence, giving you a cleaner read on whether monetization is improving per engaged user, independent of how many users showed up.
These numbers measure IAP + subscription revenue only, not ad revenue. For ad-supported casual games the headline blended ARPDAU is typically 3-10× higher when ad eCPM is added (most casual games pull $0.05-0.30 daily per active user from ads alone). The IAP-only distribution above is the cleanest view of "what users actually pay you" — a different and stricter signal than the headline ARPDAU often cited in industry posts.
Industry benchmarks by genre (2026, blended global, IAP + ads): casual / hyper-casual $0.10-0.30 ARPDAU, mid-core $0.50-2, hardcore RPG / strategy / sim $2-10+. The very top of the chart (Genshin, Royal Match, Whiteout Survival at peak) routinely shows $5-15 ARPDAU. These numbers reflect both how aggressively monetized the design is AND how engaged the active base is — both are needed to land at the top.
The distribution is heavily right-skewed — most monetizing apps cluster below $0.05 IAP ARPDAU, with a long thin tail above $0.10. The handful of apps in the $0.25+ buckets are predominantly gambling-mechanic games, dating apps with paid messaging, and premium-subscription fitness products. If your IAP ARPDAU is above $0.05, you're already in the top quartile — most apps don't get there even when they look healthy on download charts.
ARPDAU — median and top-decile by category (US iOS, May 2026 single day)
| Category | Median ARPDAU | Top-10% ARPDAU |
|---|---|---|
| Game | $0.01 | $0.04 |
| Productivity & Tools | $0.01 | $0.03 |
| Media & Entertainment | $0.01 | $0.03 |
| Education & Knowledge | $0.01 | $0.02 |
Game apps lead category medians (as expected — they're the IAP-native business model), with Productivity surprisingly close at the top-decile despite a near-zero median (most productivity apps don't monetize IAP at all, but the ones that do — typically subscription-tier productivity tools — match game-tier per-user economics).
Subscription and productivity apps generally don't use ARPDAU — they use ARPMAU (per monthly active) or per-installer revenue. The reason: their economics are recurring monthly, so daily fluctuations are noise. ARPDAU is fundamentally a "high-engagement, frequent-purchase" metric; it doesn't fit products where you charge once a month and the user opens the app twice a week.
Critical reading: low DAU drags ARPDAU down even when individual payers spend heavily. A game with great monetization but poor engagement (high CPI traffic that doesn't stick) shows misleadingly low ARPDAU. Diagnose: split ARPDAU into (paying-user share × ARPPU ÷ days-in-period) and find which factor is off. Fix engagement first (retention, push, content cadence), monetization second.
ARPDAU calculator
Enter one day's IAP + subscription revenue and that day's daily active users to get your ARPDAU, then see where it lands against the catalog.
Enter your numbers to see your result and how it compares to the catalog.
Benchmarks: MWM data, US iOS — IAP + subscription revenue (ad revenue not included).
Does ARPDAU vary by country?
Engagement metrics like [[retention]] and [[dau-mau]] stickiness are flat across markets — but monetization is the one place geography asserts itself hard.
IAP ARPDAU by country — Tier-1 vs emerging markets (US iOS, May 27, 2026)
| Country | Median ARPDAU | Top-10% ARPDAU |
|---|---|---|
| United States | $0.006 | $0.035 |
| United Kingdom | $0.006 | $0.026 |
| Germany | $0.005 | $0.028 |
| France | $0.004 | $0.014 |
| Japan | $0.005 | $0.035 |
| South Korea | $0.007 | $0.027 |
| Brazil | $0.003 | $0.020 |
Unlike retention and stickiness, IAP ARPDAU is distinctly geographic. Median IAP revenue per active user runs $0.006-0.007 in the US, UK, and South Korea, eases to ~$0.005 in Germany and Japan, and falls to $0.003 in Brazil — roughly half the US figure. The top-decile gap is wider still: ~$0.035 in the US and Japan versus $0.014 in France. India doesn't even appear in the table: almost no Indian app clears the $50/day IAP-revenue floor, because Indian mobile monetization is overwhelmingly ad-driven rather than IAP — itself a finding. The takeaway: the same retention curve converts to very different revenue depending on where users live, so geographic mix is a first-order input to any IAP LTV model — a dependency [[retention]] benchmarks alone would hide.