How to calculate percentage change between two numbers
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 ✓ Verified in Google Sheets (2026-08-30)Work out the percent increase or decrease from an old value to a new value.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel | =(B2-A2)/A2 | Format the cell as Percent. B2=new, A2=old. |
| Google Sheets | =(B2-A2)/A2 | Identical; format as %. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =(B2-A2)/A2 | Identical. |
How it works
Percentage change is (new - old) / old. Going from 200 to 250 is (250-200)/200 = 0.25 = a 25% increase. A negative result means a decrease. Then format the cell as a percentage.
Verified, not just documented
We ran =(B2-A2)/A2 in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned 0.25 — 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 0.25 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 Excel.