How to find the original price before a discount
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 ✓ Verified in Google Sheets (2026-08-30)Sale price and percent-off known — recover what it cost before.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel (desktop) | =A2/(1-B2) | A2=sale price, B2=discount rate. Divide — don't multiply by (1+B2). |
| Google Sheets | =A2/(1-B2) | Identical. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =A2/(1-B2) | Identical. |
How it works
A 25%-off sale price is 75% of the original, so dividing by 0.75 reverses it: $60 / 0.75 = $80. The tempting shortcut — adding 25% back (60 × 1.25 = $75) — is wrong, because the percentage was taken of the LARGER original, not the sale price. Same logic recovers pre-tax amounts from totals (divide by 1+rate) — reverse percentages always divide.
Verified, not just documented
We ran =A2/(1-B2) in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned 80 — exactly the expected result. We then ran the same formulas in Google Sheets, executed 2026-08-30: a formula-only workbook goes into Google Drive, which converts it to a Sheet and recalculates every formula with Google’s own engine, and comes back out as .xlsx carrying the values Google computed. It returned 80 for the worked example, the same value LibreOffice produced. Both engines’ numbers on this page are executed results. The Excel formula follows Microsoft’s official documented syntax — we do not run desktop Excel.