Checking the Number and Breakdown of Contacts in Your Current Marketing Cloud Engagement Account

To check the number of billable contacts in your active account, run a "Contacts Counts" report at the top-level business unit (parent BU, EID). The Total Distinct Contacts Count value in the report result represents the number of billable contacts for that account.

Note: Many requests to check the total contact count actually aim to clean up and remove unnecessary contacts to reduce the count. For that use case, see the related articles below, which cover deleting contacts without a channel address and the behavior and considerations for deleted contacts.

Related Articles

• Finding Contacts Without Channel Addresses
• Contact Deletion in Contact Builder
• Engagement - Understanding Contact Counts and Breakdown in Marketing Cloud Engagement
• Marketing Cloud Engagement | Impact and Considerations When Deleting Contacts from Contact Builder or API

How to Generate the Contacts Counts Report

1. Log in to your top-level Business Unit.
2. Click Analytics Builder | Reports, then click Contacts from the Report Catalog. Click the Create button next to "Contacts Counts."
3. Set your desired range for the report parameters and click the Submit button.
4. Review the results on the screen or by downloading them as a CSV file.

Important Notes:

• Always run this report from the top-level Business Unit (parent BU, EID). Reports generated from a child BU will not provide an accurate contact count.
• This report uses weekly aggregated data, so it does not provide real-time contact counts.
• We recommend not trying to reconcile the numbers in this report with one another (a very common point of confusion). For example, comparing the summed values from the Contact Builder | All Contacts screen against the Total Distinct Contacts Count value, or comparing the Total Distinct Contacts Count value against the sum of the other items in this report — in almost all environments, these sums will not match. We advise against doing this, as it is a frequent source of confusion.
• Given the above, if you need to identify unnecessary contacts or their details, please use Contacts Without Channel Addresses under Data Extract Activities.

On the Values of Each Item in Contacts Counts Report

This article provides definitions for each item in the report, but here's a quick way to understand what they mean.

The "Total Distinct Contacts Count" value indicates the number of billable contacts. All the other items — such as "Total Distinct Email Addresses" and "MobilePush Contacts" — show the number of unique addresses, not contacts. This distinction matters when you download the report as a CSV too: column names like Total_Distinct_Push_DeviceIDs_Count are also address counts, so keep that in mind when referencing them.

For Email, it's not uncommon for multiple contacts to share the same email address, so the recorded value can be smaller than the total number of subscribers. Conversely, for mobile channels, a single contact can have multiple addresses, so the recorded value can be larger than the contact count for that channel.

Based on this behavior, here are some common FAQs:

Q: My total subscriber count is 100, but the Contacts Counts report shows Total Distinct Email Addresses as 80 — lower than the subscriber count. Which number is correct? 

A: "All Subscribers" counts contacts, while the report counts addresses — that's why the values differ. Since email addresses can be duplicated across contacts, the report's number may be lower than the total subscriber count.

Q: On the All Contacts tab in Contact Builder, selecting MobilePush for a given BU shows a count of 100 in parentheses, but mobile-related report values like Total_Distinct_Push_DeviceIDs_Count show 120 — higher than that. Which number is correct? 

A: The values can differ for the same reason. It's common for a single contact to have multiple Device IDs in MobilePush, and Device IDs are unique values, so the count can exceed the BU's contact count. (In addition, as described in the next section, generating the report at the top-level BU returns the total across all BUs, which increases the discrepancy further.)

 MobilePush Contacts (Total_Distinct_Push_DeviceIDs_Count) Values When Generated from the Top-Level BU vs. a Child BU

When you generate this report at the top-level BU, the values shown for MobilePush Contacts, MobileConnect Contacts, and GroupConnect Contacts represent the total sum of mobile channel address counts across all Business Units. When generated from a child BU, only that BU's address count is returned.

Example:

Let's assume the MobilePush contact counts and device ID counts for Business Units A, B, and C are as follows. Here, Business Unit A is the top-level BU. When you generate this report in each Business Unit, the results will be as shown below:

Contact Configuration

==========================================
Business Unit A: MobilePush Contacts: 3, Device IDs: 5
Business Unit B: MobilePush Contacts: 4, Device IDs: 6
Business Unit C: MobilePush Contacts: 5, Device IDs: 7
==========================================

MobilePush Contacts (Total_Distinct_Push_DeviceIDs_Count) Field in Report Output File

==========================================
Business Unit A: 18 (Total device count across all BUs: 5 + 6 + 7 = 18)
Business Unit B: 6
Business Unit C: 7
==========================================

This illustrates that the results in this report are address counts, and that when generated from the top-level BU, the value shown is the sum across all Business Units in the account.

Note: This is strictly a sum of address counts (e.g., Device IDs) — not a contact count. To check contact counts instead of address counts, see the next section.

As shown above, Contact Builder lets you check the contact count that exists only within a specific Business Unit.