What Growth Boost Percentage Should You Set on Skool?

There is no single correct Growth Boost percentage, and the number you should set depends on one figure Skool does not show you and one it has not shipped yet. Growth Boost lets you bid a share of the recurring revenue Skool's own traffic brings you, owners report a ceiling of 70 percent, and the efficiency score meant to guide that choice is confirmed by Skool staff as not yet available to owners. This is how to decide in the meantime.

What is the Growth Boost percentage on Skool?

The Growth Boost percentage is the share of Skool-sourced recurring revenue you agree to hand back to Skool in exchange for Skool advertising your community. You set it on a slider in your group settings. A higher number tells Skool's system that your community is worth more per acquired member, which makes you a stronger candidate for the ad budget Skool is spending on owners' behalf.

The mechanic is closer to an ad auction than to an affiliate deal. You are not paying for clicks or impressions. You are bidding a percentage, and Skool decides where its money goes by comparing what each community is willing to give up against how reliably that community turns visitors into paying, staying members. We covered the announcement in full in Skool News #71 and the Growth Boost bidding system.

Why you cannot answer this properly yet

Because the efficiency score, which is the input the bid is supposed to be tuned against, has not shipped to owners. On 27 August 2026 the Skool owner Elise Hodge asked the Skoolers community "Where do we find out efficiency score? Am I missing something? Or is it just not available yet?" and added that she would "love to see it soon so I can figure out how to adjust my slider".

Alayna Lee, replying in the same thread, wrote "It's not available yet" and then, asked whether it would arrive soon, "I don't have a timeline for it yet. It's a pretty complex feature to build, so there are a lot of moving parts." That is as clear as it gets. The number Skool uses to rank you is real and is already being used, but you cannot read it.

So every owner setting a slider today is bidding blind on their own quality score. That is not a reason to leave the slider at its default. It is a reason to reason from figures you can see, which are your price, your average order value and your retention.

How high does the Growth Boost slider go?

Owners consistently name 70 percent as the top of the slider. We have now logged four separate community owners describing that ceiling in public Skool threads, and we report it as owner-reported rather than as a figure we have read off the settings screen ourselves.

Taha Asadi wrote in the announcement thread that "Growth Boost already lets us dial the percentage up to 70%". Mike Holp posted a thread titled "Maxxed Out My Growth Boost Slider" describing setting it to 70 percent. On 27 August 2026 Elise Hodge posted "Growth Boost Maxxing" in the Skoolers community and wrote "Just turned mine up to 70%. What the hell. It's FREE traffic, after all." Within twenty minutes a second owner in her comments, Levi Crypto, replied "I just did the same. Fingers crossed!"

Her diagnosis is the one to copy, because it names the real variable. Skool started advertising her community and then stopped. She read that as a payback problem rather than a quality problem, and she responded on both levers at once: bid more, and raise the value of the customer she is bidding for.

Is 70 percent actually a good idea?

It depends entirely on whether your members stay, because the percentage applies to recurring charges for the whole life of a Skool-sourced subscription, not just the first payment. That single detail is what separates this from a normal affiliate cut and it is where most of the risk sits.

Work the arithmetic on a $50 per month community. At a 70 percent bid, a Skool-sourced member leaves you $15 per month before Skool's payment processing fee, which is 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on the transaction. If that member stays twelve months you keep roughly $180 from someone you spent nothing to acquire. If they stay two months you keep about $30, and you have still done the onboarding work.

Figures are before Skool's processing fee and assume the member stays the full period. The table is arithmetic on a $50 price, not a recommendation.

The row that matters is the last one. A 70 percent bid is easiest to justify when the entry room is not where you make your money. If a $29 room feeds a $300 program, giving away 70 percent of the $29 costs you very little and buys the top of a funnel you would otherwise pay Meta or Google for. If the entry room is the whole business, 70 percent is a serious haircut on your only revenue line.

What should you actually set it to?

Set it high enough to enter the auction, then move it once, deliberately, after thirty days. There is no benefit to a cautious 5 percent bid that never wins any traffic, and no benefit to 70 percent on a page that does not convert, because a higher bid does not improve your about page.

Here is the order to work through.

Why nothing happens when you raise the slider

Because the new bid does not take effect until one transaction completes at that amount. Skool stated the mechanic outright in Skool News #72 on 1 September 2026: after you move the slider, the system knows what you have offered but has not confirmed it, and it does not act on the raised bid until a single member has actually paid at the new percentage. Skool's own phrasing was that it "kind of knows, but it's not confirmed".

That one sentence explains the most common complaint about this feature. Owners raise the percentage, watch for a week, see no change in traffic, and conclude that Growth Boost is broken or that the ceiling is a lie. It is neither. The bid is in a pending state, and the thing that clears it is a sale, which is the same event the owner is waiting on. On a low-traffic community that can take a while, and the wait is not evidence that the setting failed.

The practical consequence is that the thirty-day hold in the steps above is a floor, not a formality. Do not judge a raised bid until at least one Skool-sourced member has been charged at it. Skool also announced in the same episode that Growth Boost is being rebuilt across multiple ad accounts, with 24 to 48 hours of turbulence expected and an explicit instruction not to change settings during it, so a quiet week may be the rebuild rather than your number. The full episode is in our Skool News #72 write-up.

What Growth Boost costs you versus buying ads yourself

Growth Boost costs you margin on revenue that already happened. Paid ads cost you cash before any revenue happens. That is the whole difference, and it is why even a 70 percent bid is not obviously worse than a modest Meta budget for an owner with no spare capital.

The trade you are making is control for risk. You cannot choose the creative, the audience or the placement, and Skool can stop advertising you without notice, which is exactly what Elise Hodge observed happening. What you get in return is that a failed campaign costs you nothing.

How Skool decides who gets the traffic

Skool sorts communities by efficiency, which it has described as equivalent to quality: whether traffic sent to a group produces a return and whether those members stay. High-efficiency groups get scaled hard, mid-efficiency groups get pushed cautiously, and new or low-efficiency groups get just enough traffic to test with.

The bid sits on top of that, not in place of it. This is why the "just max it" instinct is only half right. A high bid on an efficient community wins a lot of budget. A high bid on a community that cannot retain members wins some traffic, burns it, and lowers the very score that would have won more. We wrote up the machinery in Skool's efficiency score explained, and the results owners have actually reported in real Skool Growth Boost results.

The formula you can copy

Bid what the second sale is worth, not what the first one is. If your entry room leads somewhere, the percentage you can defend is much higher than it looks on the entry price alone, and that is the cheapest structural advantage available on this platform. Building that second rung is covered in Skool membership tiers.

Move the slider once and measure for a month. Skool's allocation has a lag, so a setting changed every Tuesday produces data about nothing. Pick your number, diarise the review, and leave it alone in between.

Raise your average order value in parallel. It is the only input that improves your position at every bid level simultaneously, it is fully under your control, and unlike the efficiency score you can actually see it. If you are still deciding what to charge, start with how to price a Skool community.

Frequently asked questions

What is the highest Growth Boost percentage you can set on Skool?

Community owners consistently report 70 percent as the top of the slider. At least four owners have named that figure in public Skool threads, including one who titled his post "Maxxed Out My Growth Boost Slider" and another who wrote "Just turned mine up to 70%" on 27 August 2026. We report it as owner-reported rather than as a figure read off the settings screen, so check SETTINGS then Discovery in your own group before planning around it.

Is Growth Boost on by default, and how do I turn it off?

Growth Boost is ON by default for eligible groups. You did not opt in, so if you have never opened the setting you are already sharing a percentage of any member Skool's own traffic sends you. To change it or switch it off entirely, go to SETTINGS then Discovery, where the Growth Boost toggle and the percentage slider both live. Turning it off costs you nothing in cash and simply removes your group from the paid placements, so the real question is whether the members it brings are worth the recurring share.

Where do I find my Skool efficiency score?

You cannot see it yet. On 27 August 2026 a Skool team member confirmed in the Skoolers community that the efficiency score is "not available yet" and that there is no timeline, describing it as "a pretty complex feature to build". Skool is already using the score to allocate Growth Boost traffic, but owners have no way to read their own number at present.

Does the Growth Boost percentage apply to every payment or just the first one?

It applies to recurring charges for the life of that member's subscription, not just their first payment. This is the single most important detail in the whole system, because it means a 70 percent bid on a member who stays two years is a very different decision from a 70 percent bid on a member who leaves after six weeks. Retention, not conversion, is what makes a high bid affordable.

Is Skool Growth Boost free?

It costs you nothing in cash and a share of revenue in margin. You are never billed up front and you never lose money on traffic that fails to convert, which is why owners describe it as free traffic. What you give up is a percentage of the recurring revenue that Skool's own traffic generates, for as long as those members keep paying.

Should a brand new Skool community set the slider to 70 percent?

A new community has the weakest case for a maximum bid and the weakest reason to avoid one. Skool gives new groups only enough traffic to test with regardless of the bid, because it has no conversion history to score you on, so a high percentage mostly buys you a place in the queue. The bigger lever for a new room is the about page and the first thirty days of retention, because those are what generate the score that unlocks real budget later.

What is average order value and why does it decide my bid?

Average order value is what a member is worth to you across their whole relationship, not just their monthly price. It decides your bid because Skool's system is weighing how quickly its ad spend pays back, and a community with a low price and no upsell takes a long time to repay an ad. That is exactly the diagnosis one owner gave publicly for why her dedicated ad campaign appeared and then stopped, and why she raised both her bid and her prices at the same time.