How to Track Subscriptions in Monarch Money (2026 Verified Walkthrough)

The single most useful thing you can do with Monarch in your first hour is find every subscription you've forgotten about. The average household has between 12 and 15 active subscriptions and recognizes maybe two-thirds of them. The Recurring view in Monarch surfaces all of them automatically — Netflix, Spotify, the gym you stopped going to, the cloud backup tier you accidentally upgraded, the auto-renewing magazine that bills $89 every December.

Here's the verified walkthrough.

The fast answer

To see every subscription Monarch has detected:

1. Open Monarch (web or mobile) and click Recurring in the left navigation.
2. Review the Upcoming, Active, and Inactive sections.
3. For any subscription you no longer want, cancel it directly with the merchant (Monarch surfaces them — it doesn't cancel them for you).
4. To catch new subscriptions Monarch may have missed, check the Recurring Review flow whenever the badge appears next to the Recurring menu option.

That's the gist. The detection happens automatically every time your accounts sync new transactions — you don't have to flag anything manually.

How Monarch's recurring detection actually works

Per Monarch's Help Center documentation: "Any time your account syncs new transactions, Monarch will scan them and attempt to detect any new recurring items. The Recurring Review flow detects potential recurring merchants, as well as potential recurring liability accounts connected with Spinwheel, and presents them to you for review and approval before they are considered recurring items."

In plain English:

• Monarch's algorithm watches your transaction stream for charges that repeat at predictable intervals (monthly, weekly, annually, quarterly)
• When it finds a candidate, it creates a "potential recurring item" and queues it for your review
• A badge appears next to the Recurring menu option, plus a banner at the top of the Recurring page
• You confirm or reject — and confirmed items show up in the main Recurring list with their next expected charge date

The detection is conservative, which is the right tradeoff. Monarch would rather wait until it sees three or four occurrences of a charge before flagging it as recurring than incorrectly mark a one-off as a subscription. This means new subscriptions take 2–3 billing cycles to show up automatically. If you want to track a subscription from day one, you can mark it manually (covered below).

Step 1: Open the Recurring view

• Web (app.monarchmoney.com): Click Recurring in the left navigation sidebar.
• Mobile (iOS/Android): Tap Recurring in the bottom tab bar.

The view opens with three sections:

• Upcoming — Items expected to charge in the next 30 days
• Active — All confirmed recurring items, sorted by frequency
• Inactive — Recurring items that have stopped charging (Monarch hasn't seen them in their expected window)

Each item shows the merchant name, last amount, frequency, and next expected charge date. Click into any item for the full transaction history — useful when a subscription's price has changed and you want to see when.

Step 2: Review the Recurring Review queue

If there's a badge next to the Recurring menu, click it. The Recurring Review flow shows you each candidate Monarch has detected but hasn't yet confirmed.

For each candidate, you have three options:

• Confirm — Yes, this is a recurring item. Add it to your active list.
• Not recurring — This was a one-off charge, don't track it as a subscription.
• Edit details — Adjust the amount, frequency, or next expected date before confirming.

The "edit details" option matters more than people realize. Monarch's algorithm sometimes guesses the wrong frequency on irregular charges (annual subscriptions in particular get mistaken for monthly). Take 15 seconds to verify before confirming.

Step 3: Manually add a subscription Monarch hasn't detected yet

Two cases here:

Case A — A new subscription you signed up for last week: Monarch needs a few cycles to detect it automatically. To track it from day one:

1. Go to Recurring
2. Click + Add recurring (top right)
3. Pick the merchant from the dropdown (or type the name to search)
4. Set the amount, frequency, and next expected charge date
5. Save

Case B — A subscription you pay outside your linked accounts (e.g., a friend Venmoing you for shared Spotify Family, a domain renewal you pay via PayPal balance):

1. Same flow as Case A, but pick Manual as the merchant type
2. Enter the merchant name, amount, and frequency
3. Save

Manually-tracked recurring items appear alongside auto-detected ones. They count toward your monthly subscription total in the Recurring view.

Step 4: Cancel the subscriptions you no longer want

Monarch surfaces subscriptions; it doesn't cancel them. You'll need to cancel each one with the merchant directly. The good news is that the Recurring view gives you everything you need to cancel each one efficiently:

• The merchant name (so you know who to call/email)
• The last amount (so you can verify cancellations actually saved you that money)
• The billing frequency (so you know when to expect the next non-charge)

For each subscription you want to kill:

1. Click into the item to see its transaction history — confirm the merchant name and where to find your account
2. Open the merchant's website (or app) directly
3. Navigate to Account → Subscription / Billing
4. Click cancel
5. Save the cancellation confirmation email — you'll want it if the merchant tries to bill again

If the merchant makes cancellation deliberately difficult (some streaming services and SaaS tools have notoriously hostile cancellation flows — the FTC's "Click-to-Cancel" rule was specifically aimed at this), services like Rocket Money offer concierge cancellation as part of their Premium tier (typically a percentage of first-year savings). Monarch doesn't bundle that service — it tells you what to cancel; you do the canceling.

Step 5: Set up rules for recurring categorization

Recurring items get categorized like any other transaction, but the categories should be consistent over time. If your Spotify charges show up sometimes as "Entertainment" and sometimes as "Subscriptions," your reports get noisy.

To create a rule that locks the category:

1. Click into a recurring transaction
2. Click Create rule (or use the ... menu and select Create rule from this transaction)
3. Set the conditions: "When merchant equals 'Spotify'..."
4. Set the action: "...always categorize as 'Subscriptions'"
5. Save

The rule applies to all future transactions matching that merchant, plus optionally to historical transactions. Rules are powerful but blunt — if you have multiple accounts at the same merchant (personal Spotify + family Spotify), use modified merchant names so the rule fires correctly.

Multiple subscriptions at the same merchant

Per Monarch's documentation: "Each merchant can only have one recurring transaction linked to it. If you have two subscriptions with the same merchant, you can create a new merchant profile with a slightly modified name to differentiate and track their due dates separately."

Common cases:

• iCloud: A 50GB plan + a 200GB plan on the same Apple ID get charged separately
• AWS / cloud services: Multiple workloads billing under the same account
• Adobe Creative Cloud: Separate apps billing individually rather than the bundle

To handle these, edit the merchant name on one of the transactions slightly (e.g., "Adobe (Photoshop)" vs "Adobe (Lightroom)") and Monarch will treat them as separate recurring items.

How Monarch's subscription tracking compares

Monarch's detection is solid but conservative — by design, it waits to confirm subscriptions until they've billed multiple times. Rocket Money is more aggressive (sometimes flagging genuine one-offs as subscriptions) but adds the cancellation service if you don't want to do the cancellations yourself. The two tools serve different users — Monarch for full-budget households, Rocket Money for "find and kill subscriptions" focus. We use both side-by-side for the cancellation feature alone, and that's covered in detail in Rocket Money vs Monarch.

Common questions

Why doesn't my new subscription show up?

Monarch needs 2-3 billing cycles to detect a recurring pattern. For a monthly subscription, expect it to appear in the Recurring view within 60-90 days. To track it sooner, add it manually via + Add recurring.

A subscription I cancelled is still showing as Active

Monarch only marks an item as Inactive when it doesn't see the expected charge in the expected window. If you canceled a monthly subscription on the 15th and the next charge was due on the 18th, it'll take until ~21st of next month for Monarch to mark it Inactive. You can manually move it to Inactive via the ... menu.

Can Monarch detect subscriptions paid via PayPal or buy-now-pay-later?

If your PayPal account is connected, yes — but only the PayPal-side transactions, not the underlying merchant. So a $14.99 monthly Spotify charge paid via PayPal shows up as "PayPal — Spotify" in your transactions. Monarch's recurring detector treats this correctly as a subscription. If you pay via Klarna/Affirm/Afterpay, the BNPL provider needs to be linked separately.

Does Monarch find subscriptions I'm paying via gift card or balance?

No. If a subscription is being paid from an Amazon balance, an iTunes balance, or any payment method that doesn't show up as a transaction in your linked accounts, Monarch can't see it. These have to be tracked manually.

Why is the same recurring item showing twice?

Usually because you've paid the merchant from two different accounts (personal credit card one month, business card the next), and Monarch is treating each account-merchant combo as separate. Use the merchant rename trick to consolidate, or accept the duplication if the splits are genuinely different (personal Netflix + family Netflix on different cards).

Can my partner see the same Recurring view?

Yes — Monarch's Shared Views feature gives both partners the full Recurring view under one Core subscription. Either partner can confirm/dismiss items.

Does Monarch alert me before a subscription charges?

There's no per-item charge alert (yet). The Upcoming section shows what's expected in the next 30 days, and Monarch's weekly digest email mentions the week's expected recurring charges. If you want a pre-charge ping for everything, Rocket Money does this more proactively.

If you specifically want concierge cancellation (someone calls the merchant for you), Rocket Money bundles that service. For the surfacing-only approach paired with full budgeting, Monarch's the right pick — and most households end up using both. See Rocket Money vs Monarch Money for the full side-by-side.

Related reading:

• Monarch Money Review 2026
• Is Monarch Money Worth It?
• How to Connect Bank Accounts to Monarch
• How to Create a Budget in Monarch
• How to Track Expenses in Monarch
• How to Use Monarch's AI Assistant
• Rocket Money vs Monarch Money
• Monarch vs YNAB

Not financial, legal, or tax advice. We earn a commission if you sign up for Monarch through a link on this page; the price is the same and the editorial content is unaffected. Every step in this guide is verified against Monarch's official Help Center documentation as of May 7, 2026.