Abstract Recent studies of neutral atomic hydrogen (H i) in nearby galaxies found that all field disk galaxies are H i saturated, in that they carry roughly as much H i as permitted before this gas becomes gravitationally unstable. By taking this H i saturation for granted, the atomic gas fraction fatm of galactic disks can be predicted as a function of the stability parameter q = jσ/(GM), where M and j are the baryonic mass and specific angular momentum of the disk and σ is the H i velocity dispersion (Obreschkow et al. 2016). The log-ratio Δfq between this predictor and the observed atomic fraction can be seen as a physically motivated ‘H i deficiency’. While field disk galaxies have Δfq ≈ 0, objects subject to environmental removal of H i are expected to have Δfq > 0. Within this framework, we revisit the H i deficiencies of satellite galaxies in the Virgo cluster and in clusters of the EAGLE simulation. We find that observed and simulated cluster galaxies are H i deficient and that Δfq slightly increases when getting closer to the cluster centres. The Δfq values are similar to traditional H i deficiency estimators, but Δfq is more directly comparable between observations and simulations than morphology-based deficiency estimators. By tracking the simulated H i deficient cluster galaxies back in time, we confirm that Δfq ≈ 0 until the galaxies first enter a halo with $M_{\rm halo}>10^{13}\rm M_{⊙ }$, at which moment they quickly lose H i by environmental effects. Finally, we use the simulation to investigate the links between Δfq and quenching of star formation.