How to Find Percent Change in Excel

What this does

Percentage change tells you how much a value rose or fell relative to where it started, which is what makes a €20 move on €100 (20%) and a €20 move on €400 (5%) comparable. Subtracting old from new gives the absolute change; dividing by the old value rebases it to a rate. A positive result is an increase, a negative one a decrease. Most people learn this as a sequence of clicks and forget it by next week; learning it as a pattern instead is what lets you apply it to the next, slightly different version of the problem without starting from scratch. That is the difference this page is trying to make. Treat “find percent change in excel” as a small repeatable workflow rather than a one-off click you hope to remember next time. Use a small test block before the live file, so any surprise in the affected cells shows up while it is still harmless. When a formula is involved, keep the inputs labelled beside it, reference cells instead of typing values, and apply number formatting only after the result checks out. That turns a calculation you can defend to a CFO or an auditor into a method you can reuse, explain, and defend when the workbook leaves your screen.

A worked example

A price goes from 120 to 168: =(168-120)/120 = 0.4, formatted as 40% — a 40% increase. If it instead fell to 90, =(90-120)/120 = −25%. The tool above colours increases green and decreases red and also shows the raw unit change, so you see both the rate and the absolute move. Percentage change is the language of every trend: month-on-month revenue, year-on-year growth, price moves, conversion shifts. It turns two raw numbers into a comparable story anyone can read at a glance. If there is any chance you will reuse this, drop it into a small template tab right now: a labelled input area on the left and the formula beside it, checked once against the tool above. Next time the same question comes up, the answer is a single paste away instead of a rebuild from memory.

In Google Sheets

Everything above works in Google Sheets too. Excel and Sheets share the formula syntax used here; only the surrounding menus are arranged differently. That portability is deliberate — learn it once and it follows you between the two tools and across Windows and Mac. Nothing on this page is behind a login: the tool runs entirely in your browser, the formula is shown in full with one-click copy, and the steps work the same on Windows and Mac. That is the whole promise here — the exact answer, a way to prove it on your own numbers, and just enough context to make it stick. Treat “find percent change in excel” as a small building block rather than a chore. Once the inputs sit in their own cells and the formula reads from them, the same setup answers a dozen related questions with a tweak, and Excel keeps every dependent figure current as the data changes. The tool above is there so you can rehearse and verify before committing anything to a real workbook; the steps and worked example are there so the logic sticks. Get it right once and it stops costing you time — it starts saving it, every time the question comes back around.

Common mistakes

• Dividing by the new value instead of the old — the base must be the starting point.
• Leaving the result as a decimal (0.4) instead of formatting it as 40%.
• Averaging percentage changes across periods instead of compounding them.
• Dividing by zero when the original value is 0, which has no defined percentage change.

Frequently asked questions