ROUND vs MROUND: to decimals or to a multiple
ROUND snaps to a number of decimal PLACES; MROUND snaps to the nearest MULTIPLE of whatever you give it. "Round to 2 decimals" is ROUND; "round to the nearest quarter / nickel / 15 minutes" is MROUND. Choosing by the unit you're thinking in makes the formula read itself.
The differences at a glance
| ROUND | MROUND | |
|---|---|---|
| Rounds to | A number of decimal places | The nearest multiple of a value |
| 2.37 → | ROUND(x,1) = 2.4 | MROUND(x,0.25) = 2.50 |
| Direction | Nearest (ROUNDUP/DOWN force it) | Nearest (CEILING/FLOOR force it) |
| Whole-number step | ROUND(x,0) | MROUND(x,5) for nearest 5, MROUND(x,1) = nearest integer |
| Negative sign rule | Works with any sign | Number and multiple must share a sign, or MROUND errors (#NUM!) |
| Compatibility | Universal | Universal (both verified in every version we test) |
Which should you use?
- ROUND — Decimal precision: currency to cents (2 places), trimming display noise, ROUND(x,-2) for the nearest hundred. It's the everyday rounder.
- MROUND — Real-world increments: prices to the nearest 0.05 or 0.25, quantities to case sizes, and time to 15-minute blocks with MROUND(t,TIME(0,15,0)). Anything sold or billed in fixed steps.
Compatibility (Excel for the web, Sheets & LibreOffice executed; desktop Excel per docs)
Both execute identically in every LibreOffice build and in the Google Sheets run we execute (desktop Excel per Microsoft's docs — we do not run desktop Excel). One MROUND gotcha that's the same everywhere: the value and the multiple must have the same sign — MROUND(-7,5) errors, MROUND(-7,-5) is fine. For forced-direction multiple rounding, CEILING and FLOOR are the cousins (see ROUNDUP vs CEILING). Excel for the web is a separate application with its own calculation engine, and that one we do execute: all 9 corpus cases for these functions matched the documented values there (recalculated on OneDrive, 2026-09-01); the per-case values are on the individual function pages.
Example formulas
| Money to cents | =ROUND(A2,2) |
| Price to nearest nickel | =MROUND(A2,0.05) |
| Time to nearest 15 min | =MROUND(A2,TIME(0,15,0)) |
Full per-version details on each function page: ROUND · MROUND.