Percentage Increase Calculator
Put the old number in one box and the new number in the other. You get the change between them as a percentage, labelled as an increase or a decrease.
About this tool
The change is measured against the original value, which is the convention every dashboard and board pack uses. The result updates as soon as both boxes hold a number and is rounded to two decimal places.
Starting from zero has no percentage answer, and the tool says so rather than showing an infinity symbol or a misleading 100%. Negative starting values are handled by comparing against the magnitude of the original, so the direction label stays correct when you are working with figures that dip below zero.
Everything runs in your browser — nothing you enter here is sent to a server or stored. Provided as is, without warranty.
Reading a percentage change without fooling yourself
Percentage change is the most quoted number in any early-stage update and the easiest one to misread. The formula is simply the difference divided by the original, but the original is doing all the work. Going from 4 sign-ups to 8 is a 100% increase and going from 400 to 480 is a 20% increase, and the second is the more meaningful business event by a wide margin. Small denominators produce enormous percentages, which is why a first month always looks spectacular and a fifth month rarely does.
The two directions are also not symmetrical, and this catches people out constantly. A number that falls by 50% needs to rise by 100% to get back to where it started. So a chart showing “down 40% in March, up 40% in April” has not recovered; it is still roughly 16% below where it began. Whenever you see a drop and a rise of similar size quoted together, work out the absolute values before you conclude that things are fine.
Here is the caveat that matters most in practice: keep percentage points and percentages apart. If your conversion rate moves from 2% to 3%, that is a rise of one percentage point and an increase of fifty percent. Both statements are true, they describe the same event, and only one of them belongs in an investor update without qualification. State which you mean every time, because a reader who assumes the other one will be wrong by a factor you did not intend.
Once a change gets large, percentages stop being the clearest framing. Beyond a couple of hundred percent, most people instinctively translate the figure into a multiplier anyway, so you may as well say it that way with the times increase calculator. And if what you are actually comparing is two conversion rates rather than two raw counts, the conversion rate comparison calculator gives you the relative lift with the right framing attached.
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