Research in graduate education has largely been focused around admission practices and retention. Within the physics community specifically, there is less information on the rate of students receiving degrees. Motivated by understanding the connection that retention has with institutional requirements, we propose three measures utilizing survey data collected for decades by the American Institute of Physics. Utilizing these measures for the 284 graduate programs, we find that the average yearly retention of graduate students is 97%, and the percentage of first year graduate students who are awarded PhDs and Master's is 57% and 27% respectively. These measures highlight a significant difficulty in establishing a yearly measure for changes in graduate student populations, but a good starting point into the rate of students earning degrees. To further this work, we must ensure that the measures can become robust enough to be applied to individual institutions.