Percentage Change 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. Keep the inputs visible and clearly labelled and the whole thing stays auditable — anyone who opens the file later, including you, can see at a glance exactly what feeds the result and change one assumption without hunting through the formula. Treat “percentage change 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. One habit worth forming early: name the cells that hold your inputs, so the formula reads in plain language instead of a string of cell addresses. A reviewer — or you in three months — can then follow the logic without decoding what B7 and D2 were supposed to mean, which is most of what makes a sheet maintainable.

In Google Sheets

If you are in Google Sheets rather than Excel, the good news is that the formula shown here is identical and the workflow barely changes — menus sit across the top instead of in a ribbon, and a few function names differ slightly, but anything you build here moves across with little or no rework. The aim was to get you unstuck fast and leave you a little more capable than a copy-paste would. The answer is at the top, the tool proves it, and the detail above shows why it holds — so the next time a colleague asks, you can answer without reaching for search. The short version of “percentage change excel”: the answer is at the top of this page, the tool proves it on your own numbers, and the sections above explain why it holds so the next variation does not stump you. Excel rewards people who reference cells instead of typing values and who keep inputs separate from formulas, because that is what makes a result you can audit months later. Build it once, deliberately, with the live tool as a check, and you convert a one-off lookup into a reusable skill — which is the whole point of learning the why and not just the what.

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