Enter an original value and a new value to calculate the percent change. Works for revenue growth, cost changes, metric improvements, headcount, and any other before-and-after comparison. You get the percent increase or decrease, the actual difference, the percent difference, and every step of the calculation, so you can check the math or copy it into your homework, report, or spreadsheet.
Type the starting number and the ending number. Negative numbers and decimals work too.
Already know the percent? Apply it to a number to find the new value, like a 15% raise, a 20% discount, or a 3% price increase.
Percent change measures how much a value has increased or decreased relative to its original amount, expressed as a percentage. A positive result is an increase. A negative result is a decrease. Percent change is one of the most universally used metrics in business because it puts absolute changes in context: a revenue increase of $10,000 means something very different for a $50,000 business than for a $500,000 business, but a 20 percent increase communicates the same relative scale regardless of the starting number.
Small business managers use percent change constantly: to measure month-over-month revenue growth, to track expense changes, to report KPI improvements to stakeholders, to calculate raise percentages, to measure headcount changes, and to benchmark current performance against prior periods. The calculation is simple enough to do mentally in many cases, but having a reliable tool removes the possibility of direction errors -- calculating an increase when the value actually decreased, or vice versa.
You do not need a calculator to find a percent change, although it helps avoid sign mistakes. Here is the manual method, using a price that rose from $40 to $52.
If the answer in step 1 is negative, the final answer is negative too, and that means a percent decrease. That is the whole method, whether you are working with prices, test scores, website traffic, population counts, or payroll costs.
When the value goes up, many people prefer to write the formula so the answer comes out positive:
When the value goes down, flip the subtraction so the decrease is reported as a positive number:
Both are the same math as the main percent change formula. The only difference is whether you want the sign to tell you the direction, or you state the direction in words.
| Situation | Original | New | Percent Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hourly wage raise | $20.00 | $22.50 | +12.5% |
| Monthly website visitors | 8,000 | 11,200 | +40% |
| Sale price on a jacket | $120 | $90 | −25% |
| Employee headcount | 24 | 30 | +25% |
| Test score | 72 | 90 | +25% |
| Monthly overtime hours | 160 | 120 | −25% |
| Stock price | $50 | $125 | +150% |
Notice that the test score and the headcount both rose 25 percent even though one went up by 18 points and the other by 6 people. That is exactly why percent change is useful: it makes very different numbers comparable.
One of the most common percent change surprises is that an increase and a decrease of the same percent do not cancel out. Each change is measured from a different starting point. If sales fall 50 percent from $100,000 to $50,000, a 50 percent rebound only gets you to $75,000. You need a 100 percent increase to get back to where you started.
| If a value drops by | It needs this increase to recover |
|---|---|
| 10% | 11.11% |
| 20% | 25% |
| 25% | 33.33% |
| 33.33% | 50% |
| 50% | 100% |
| 75% | 300% |
The recovery formula is: Required Increase (%) = (Drop ÷ (100 − Drop)) × 100. Keep this in mind when you set targets after a bad month, price a discount, or explain a rebound to your team.
Percent change and percentage points are frequently confused but measure different things. If your conversion rate increases from 2 percent to 3 percent, that is a change of 1 percentage point -- but it is a 50 percent increase in conversion rate. The distinction matters significantly when communicating performance: saying "our conversion rate improved by 50 percent" is accurate and meaningful; saying "our conversion rate improved by 1 percent" understates the improvement. Always clarify which measure you are using when communicating percent-related changes to avoid misinterpretation.
Percent change and percent difference sound alike, but they answer different questions. Percent change has a direction: it measures how far a value moved from a starting point, so swapping the two numbers changes the answer. Percent difference has no starting point: it compares two values side by side by dividing the gap between them by their average, so the order does not matter.
Example: Store A sold 80 units and Store B sold 100 units in the same week. Neither number is the "before," so percent difference is the right tool: 20 ÷ 90 × 100 = 22.22 percent. If you instead wanted to know how much Store B's sales grew from last week's 80 to this week's 100, that is percent change: a 25 percent increase. The calculator above shows both numbers so you can use whichever fits.
If you track numbers in a spreadsheet, you can calculate percent change for an entire column at once. Put the original values in column A and the new values in column B, then enter this in C2 and fill it down:
Format column C as a percentage (Home > Number > Percent Style in Excel, or Format > Number > Percent in Google Sheets). Do not multiply by 100 in the formula when you use percent formatting, or you will get 2,500% instead of 25%. Two upgrades handle the edge cases:
=(B2-A2)/ABS(A2) keeps the sign pointing in the right direction.=IFERROR((B2-A2)/ABS(A2),"n/a") shows n/a instead of a #DIV/0! error.For month-over-month growth in a single column, use =(A3-A2)/A2 in B3 and fill down. Want to go deeper on spreadsheet formulas? Browse the free Excel help tools or the free Google Sheets help library.
Month-over-month or year-over-year revenue comparison is the most common use. Expense tracking -- seeing which cost categories increased or decreased between periods -- uses percent change to prioritize where to investigate. KPI reporting uses percent change to show improvement or regression against a prior baseline. Salary increase calculations, pricing adjustments, and inventory cost changes all involve percent change. Tracking the same metrics consistently over time and expressing changes as percentages is one of the simplest ways to build the data culture that separates businesses that manage by the numbers from those that manage by intuition.
Subtract the original value from the new value, divide the result by the original value, then multiply by 100. For example, going from 80 to 100 is (100 - 80) / 80 x 100 = a 25 percent increase.
Use the same formula. When the new value is smaller than the original, the answer is negative, which means a decrease. Going from 200 to 150 is (150 - 200) / 200 x 100 = -25 percent, a 25 percent decrease.
Yes. Any increase that more than doubles the original value is over 100 percent. Going from 50 to 150 is a 200 percent increase. A decrease can never go below -100 percent, because -100 percent means the value dropped to zero.
Percent change from zero is undefined, because you cannot divide by zero. Report the actual change instead, such as $4,000 in new revenue from a zero base, or describe it as new rather than as a percent increase.
Divide by the absolute value of the original number so the sign of the answer still shows the direction. Going from -50 to -20 is (-20 - (-50)) / 50 x 100 = +60 percent, an improvement. This calculator does that automatically.
Percent change compares a new value to an original value, so the order matters. Percent difference compares two values with no starting point by dividing the gap by their average, so the order does not matter. Use percent change for before and after, and percent difference for side-by-side comparisons.
With the original value in A2 and the new value in B2, enter =(B2-A2)/A2 and format the cell as a percentage. Use =(B2-A2)/ABS(A2) if the original value can be negative, and wrap it in IFERROR to handle zeros.
No. Each percent change is measured from a different starting point. If 100 drops 50 percent to 50, a 50 percent gain only brings it back to 75. You need a 100 percent gain to get back to 100.
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