Starting October 1st 2026 Hoxhunt is changing how onboarding rate is calculated for companies that use Hoxhunt user licenses. Users who don't hold a Hoxhunt license (Comply, Change, or Evolve) will no longer be considered in the onboarding rate — or in the risk scores calculated from it — at all.

This is a separate change from the November 2024 update described in Onboarding rate definition changes for companies using Comply licenses. That change affected how a user becomes onboarded. This change affects which users are counted in the first place.

What's changing

Until now, onboarding rate counted every user added to your organization, whether or not they held a Hoxhunt license. In practice, this meant that users who could never complete onboarding — because they had no license and therefore no access to training — were still counted against your onboarding rate. Common examples include shared mailboxes, service/robot accounts, and users who are mid-transition between license types.

Going forward, unlicensed users are removed from the calculation entirely — not counted as "not onboarded," simply not counted at all.

Old equation for onboarding rate:

onboarded_users / total_users

New equation for onboarding rate:

onboarded_licensed_users / total_licensed_users

Unlicensed users are excluded from both the numerator and the denominator. The same exclusion applies everywhere onboarding rate feeds into a risk score.

Where this shows up

This change affects onboarding rate and risk scores everywhere they're reported:

• Admin Portal → Phishing Training → Performance — the Onboarding rate tile (both your organization's rate and the industry benchmark)
• Admin Portal → Human Risk Dashboard — the full risk score: Security Score, Global Average, all three category cards, all nine metric drill-downs, heat maps, and the Novice / Master / Legend bands
• CxO Report → Overview — the User onboarding donut, the monthly onboarding chart, and the CSV/PDF exports
• CxO Report → Countries / Departments / Sites / Domains — the "Onboarding rate by…" breakdown pages
• Cloud Export — if you export Hoxhunt data to your own S3, Azure, or GCS bucket, the hoxhunt_security_score, onboarding_rate, and risk_score_per_* files will reflect the new calculation

How will my onboarding rate be affected?

The direction of the effect depends on your organization, and we want to be specific about both cases:

For most organizations, onboarding rate will stay the same or go up on October 1st 2026. Excluding unlicensed users removes accounts that could never onboard from the calculation, so the rate among your actual licensed users is typically equal to or higher than before. Based on our analysis: roughly 6 in 10 organizations will see no change at all, and roughly 8 in 10 will see a change of 1 percentage point or less. A smaller number of organizations — generally those with a large number of unlicensed, non-human, or admin accounts — will see a more noticeable increase.

For a small number of organizations, onboarding rate would go down under the new calculation. This happens where a meaningful share of an organization's actively onboarded, engaged users show up as "unlicensed" in our data — usually due to a license data mismatch (for example, users assigned the wrong license type) or because the organization is mid-transition between license models. Removing those users from the numerator lowers the visible rate, even though nothing about actual user behavior has changed.

To avoid surprising those organizations with a sudden drop, we are temporarily keeping the old calculation in place for the affected accounts. If this applies to your organization, your Customer Success Manager should reach out directly. The old calculation will remain in place until you have reviewed the change with your CSM, but no later than end of year 2026.

Your risk scores are affected in the same direction and on the same timeline as your onboarding rate, since risk scores are calculated in part from onboarding rate.

Frequently asked questions

Is my organization using Hoxhunt licenses? If you assign Comply, Change, and/or Evolve licenses to users and can see license usage under Admin Portal → Settings → User licenses, you are using licenses and therefore this change applies to you.

Is the change applied retroactively to historical reports? No. The new calculation takes effect from the release date forward; historical data in existing reports is not recalculated.

My organization's onboarding rate went down without notice — what happened? Can I get it back to how it was? A small number of organizations were identified where the new calculation would produce a lower onboarding rate due to license data issues rather than actual user behavior. Those organizations are being kept on the previous calculation temporarily while their Customer Success Manager works with them directly. If you believe your organization should be in this exclusion group but haven't heard from your CSM, please reach out to Hoxhunt Support who can restore your onboarding rate calculation until end of 2026.

Does this affect Human Risk Dashboard risk scores, not just onboarding rate? Yes. Because risk scores are calculated in part from onboarding rate, the Human Risk Dashboard, Security Score, and related metric drill-downs are all affected in the same way and on the same timeline.

Does this affect our Cloud Export data? Yes. If your organization uses Cloud Export, the onboarding_rate, hoxhunt_security_score, and risk_score_per_* files will reflect the new calculation going forward.