How to find what percentile a value falls in
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 ✓ Verified in Google Sheets (2026-08-30)The inverse of a percentile: given a value, what fraction of the data is at or below it — where a score, price, or time ranks in the pack.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel (desktop) | =PERCENTRANK.INC(A2:A100,30) | Returns 0-1 (multiply by 100 for a percent). Replace 30 with a cell. PERCENTRANK() is the older alias; PERCENTRANK.EXC excludes the endpoints. |
| Google Sheets | =PERCENTRANK(A2:A100,30) | Identical (matches Excel's .INC). PERCENTRANK.EXC also available. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =PERCENTRANK(A2:A100,30) | Identical. |
How it works
PERCENTRANK is the mirror image of PERCENTILE: instead of 'what value sits at the 90th percentile?', it answers 'what percentile is THIS value?'. It ranks the target within the sorted data on a 0-to-1 scale — in {10,20,30,40} the value 30 sits above two of the three gaps, so its rank is 2/3 ≈ 0.667, i.e. the ~67th percentile. Multiply by 100 to show a percent. Values between data points are interpolated, so you can ask the rank of a number that isn't in the list. Like PERCENTILE it comes in two flavours: .INC (inclusive, the default and what plain PERCENTRANK uses) spans 0 to 1 across the min and max, while .EXC (exclusive) never quite reaches 0 or 1. Use it to turn raw scores into 'top X%' language, or to place a new observation against a historical distribution.
Verified, not just documented
We ran =ROUND(PERCENTRANK.INC(A2:A5,30),4) in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned 0.667 — 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 0.667 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.
Functions used
PERCENTRANK.INC · PERCENTRANK — see full Excel, Google Sheets & LibreOffice compatibility for each.