Percentage points vs percent change: compute both
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 ✓ Verified in Google Sheets (2026-08-30)A rate moved from 40% to 45% — is that 5% or 12.5%? Both, and the difference matters.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel (desktop) | =B2-A2 | Percentage POINTS: plain subtraction of the two rates. Relative percent change: =(B2-A2)/A2. |
| Google Sheets | =B2-A2 | Identical. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =B2-A2 | Identical. |
How it works
Subtracting the rates gives percentage POINTS (45% − 40% = 5 points — the honest way to report a rate change); dividing that gap by the starting rate gives relative percent change (5/40 = 12.5% — the headline-friendly number). Both are correct; mixing the labels is how a 5-point rise gets reported as "12.5% growth". Finance sidesteps the ambiguity with basis points: multiply the point difference by 10,000 (here, 500 bps).
Verified, not just documented
We ran =ROUND((B2-A2)/A2,4) in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned 0.125 — 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 0.125 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.