Calculate Percentage Change in MS Excel (% Increase/Decrease Formula)

When working with data in MS Excel, calculating the percentage change is a common task.

Whether you are working with professional sales data, resource management, project management, or personal data, knowing how to calculate percentage change would help you make better decisions and do better data analysis in Excel.

It’s effortless, thanks to unique MS Excel features and functions.

This tutorial will show you how to calculate percentage change in Excel (i.e., percentage increase or decrease over time).

So let’s get started!

Figure Out Percentage Change Between Two Values (Easy Formula)

For example, if the price of an item increases from $60 to $80, this could be a scenario where you have to calculate how much a percentage increase happened in this case.

Let’s have a look at examples.

Percentage Increase

Suppose I have the data set below where I have the old price of an item in cell A2 and the new price in cell B2.

The formula to calculate the percentage increase would be:

=Change in Price/Original Price

Below is the formula to calculate the price percentage increase in Excel:

=(B2-A2)/A2

There’s a possibility that you may get the resulting value in decimals (the matter would be correct but need a suitable format).

To convert this decimal into a percentage value, select the cell with the values and then click on the percentage icon (%) in the Number group in the Home tab of the Excel ribbon.

If you want to increase or decrease the number of digits after the decimal, use the Increase/Decrease decimal icons next to the percentage icon.

 

Percentage Decrease

Calculating a percentage decrease works the exact way as a percentage increase.

Guess you have the below two values where the new price is lower than the old.

In this topic, you can use the below formula to calculate the percentage decrease:
=(B2-A2)/A2

Since we calculate the percentage decrease, we calculate the difference between the old and the new price and divide that value by the old price.

Calculate the Value After Percentage Increase/Decrease.

Suppose you have a data set as displayed below, where I have some values in column A and the percentage change values in column B.

Down is the formula you can use to calculate the final value that would be after incorporating the percentage change in column B:

You need to copy and paste this formula for all the cells in Column C.

In the above formula, I first calculate the overall percentage that needs to be multiplied by the value. I add the percentage value to 1 (within brackets) to do that.

And this final value is then multiplied by the values in column A to get the result.

As you can see, it would work for both percentage increase and percentage decrease.

In case you’re using Excel with Microsoft 365 subscription, you can use the downward formula (and you don’t need to worry about copy-pasting the formula:

Increase/Decrease an Entire Column with Specific Percentage Values

Suppose you have a data set as shown below where I retain the old values in column A, and I want the new values column to be 10% higher than the old values.

That means I want to increase all the values in Column A by 10%.

You can use the below formula to do this:

The overhead formula multiplies the old value by 110%, which would end up giving you a value that is 10% higher.

Likewise, if you want to decrease the entire column by 10%, you can use the below formula:

Remember to copy and paste this formula for the entire column.
If you have the value (by which you want to increase or decrease the entire column) in a cell, you can use the cell reference instead of hardcoding it into the formula.

For example, if I have the percentage value in cell D2, I can use the below formula to get the new Values after the percentage change:

The benefit of having the percentage change value in a separate cell is that if you have to change the calculation by changing this value, you need to do that in one cell. Since all the formulas are link to the cell, the formulas would automatically update.

Percentage Change in Excel with Zero

While calculating percentage change in excel is relatively easy, you will likely face some challenges when a zero is involved in the calculation.

For example, if your old value is zero and your new weight is 100, what do you think is a percentage increase.

 

 

Percentage Change With Negative Numbers

 

If you have negative numbers involved and want to calculate the percentage change, things get tricky.

With negative numbers, there could be the following two cases:

1. Both the values are negative
2. One of the values is negative, and the Other one is Positive

Let’s go through this one by one!

Both the Values are Negative

I want to find out what’s the change in percentage when values change from -10 to -50,
The good news is that if both the values are negative, you can go ahead and use the same logic and formula you use with positive numbers.

 

If both the numbers have the same sign (positive or negative), the math takes care of it.

One Value is Positive, and One is Negative

In this scenario, there are two possibilities:

1. The old value is positive, and new value is negative
2. The old value is negative, and new value is positive

Let’s look at the first scenario!

Old Value is Negative, and New Value is Positive

This one needs one minor change.

Suppose you’re calculating the change where the old value is -10 and the new value is 10.

 

If we use the same formulas, we will get -200% (which is incorrect as the value change has been positive).

What happens since the denominator in our example is negative. So while the value change is positive, the denominator makes the final result a negative percentage change.

Here is the fix – make the denominator positive.

And here is the new formula you can use in case you have negative values involved:

The A.B.S. function gives the absolute value, so negative values automatically change to positive ones.

So these are some methods that you can use to calculate percentage change in Excel. I have also covered the scenarios where you need to calculate percent change when one of the values could be 0 or negative.

I hope you found this helpful tutorial! MS EXCEL VBA

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