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Page: Failure Rates
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Most sources cite the failure rate for Depo-Provera at 0.3 percent annually, which would be three women out of a thousand per year. This number is based on large prospective clinical trials of women actually using Depo-Provera. Another method of determining efficacy is based on retrospective surveys that rely on a woman's recall of her contraceptive use over the past 4 to 5 years, such as the National Surveys of Family Growth (NSFG) -- a primary source of data used for estimating user-dependent contraceptive failure rates in the United States. The number of women in the NSFG retrospective survey using Depo-Provera, Norplant, and IUDs is small, much smaller than number of women in the prospective clinical trials that evaluated the effectiveness of Depo-Provera, Norplant, and IUDs. NSFG survey data may uncover more realistic failure rates for user-dependent contraceptive methods, but has been found to produce unrealistically high failure rates for contraceptive methods that are not user-dependent (this has been attributed to contraceptive overreporting). For example, NSFG survey data combined from 1988 and 1995 for Depo-Provera, Norplant, and IUDs produced a combined standardized failure rate for these three methods of 3.2 per year. Higher rates (combining Depo-Provera, Norplant, and IUD use) for women aged 20-24 (5.1 percent) and for cohabiting couples (6.5 percent). The two year combined failure rate for Depo-Provera, Norplant, and IUD use for women aged 20-24 was 10.9 percent, which comes out to one woman in ten.
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