How to Calculate Percentage Increase in Excel

Percentage increase is a useful measure to compare the change in a value over time. For example, you may want to know how much your sales have increased from last year to this year, or how much your weight has changed from last month to this month. In this article, we will show you how to calculate percentage increase in Excel using a simple formula. We will also explain the basic theory behind the formula and provide a detailed example with real numbers. Finally, we will explore some other approaches to calculate percentage increase in Excel.

The formula for percentage increase is:

Percentage Increase=New Value−Old Value/Old Value ​×100%

This formula calculates the difference between the new value and the old value, and then divides it by the old value. This gives us the ratio of the change to the original value. Multiplying by 100% converts the ratio to a percentage.

For example, if the old value is 50 and the new value is 75, the percentage increase is:

Percentage Increase=75−50 / 50 ​×100%=0.5×100%=50%

This means that the value has increased by 50% from the old value to the new value.

Procedures

To calculate percentage increase in Excel, you can use the following steps:

1. Enter the old value and the new value in two adjacent cells, such as A1 and B1.
2. In another cell, such as C1, enter the formula: =(B1-A1)/A1*100
3. Press Enter to get the result. You can format the cell as a percentage by clicking the Percentage button on the Home tab.
4. You can copy and paste the formula to other cells if you have multiple pairs of values to compare.

Example

Let’s say you have a table of monthly sales data for a product, as shown below:

You want to calculate the percentage increase in sales for each month compared to the previous month. You can use the formula for percentage increase in Excel as follows:

1. Enter the sales data in cells A2:B5.
2. In cell C3, enter the formula: =(B3-B2)/B2*100
3. Press Enter to get the result. You should see 20% in cell C3, which means that the sales in February increased by 20% compared to January.
4. Copy and paste the formula to cells C4 and C5 to get the percentage increase for March and April. You should see 25% and 20% respectively.
5. Format the cells C3:C5 as percentages by clicking the Percentage button on the Home tab.

Your final table should look like this:

Other Approaches

There are some other ways to calculate percentage increase in Excel, such as:

• Using the PERCENTAGE function, which returns the percentage of a number. For example, you can enter the formula =PERCENTAGE(B3-B2,B2) in cell C3 to get the same result as before.
• Using the PERCENTRANK function, which returns the rank of a value as a percentage of a data set. For example, you can enter the formula =PERCENTRANK(B$2:B$5,B3) in cell C3 to get the percentage rank of the sales in February among the four months. You should see 33.33%, which means that the sales in February are higher than 33.33% of the sales in the four months.
• Using a pivot table, which can summarize and analyze data in various ways. For example, you can create a pivot table from the sales data and add a calculated field that uses the formula for percentage increase. You can then drag the calculated field to the Values area and the Month field to the Rows area to get a table similar to the one above.