Percentage Increase Calculator

1. How to calculate percentage increase?
• Percentage increase formula
2. Percent increase calculation examples
• New versus old salary / hourly rate
• Business growth examples
• Calculate price with tax
• Increase in property value example

    How to calculate percentage increase?

Percentage increase is a useful thing to calculate when comparing time periods, estimating growth percent (yearly, monthly, daily etc.), or comparing a new state to an old state of things, e.g. a new salary or hourly rate, versus your previous one. The formula for calculating percent increase used in our percentage increase calculator is:

    Percentage increase formula

Percent increase = new / old * 100 - 100

where new is the newer quantity or measure, and old is the older (or original) quantity or measure.

In other cases, you know the starting, or original quantity, measure, or price, and you want to estimate what it would be if it were increased by a given percentage. In this case the formula used is:

Increased value = base + base * % increase / 100

where base is the starting amount and % increase is the percentage to increase it by. Let us see some examples to see how it works.

    Percent increase calculation examples

Several practical examples on how to work out a percentage increase should illustrate the use of relative growth calculations in various applied scenarios.

New versus old salary / hourly rate

First, consider an example of a salary percentage increase. Say your salary is $50,000 and you were offered a salary hike amounting to a 20% increase of your current pay. To calculate your new salary after the raise do: $50,000 + $50,000 * 20 / 100 = $50,000 + $50,000 * 0.2 = $50,000 + $10,000 = $60,000.

In another example, say you have been approached with an opportunity for a new job and they offer you a yearly wage of $60,000 instead of your current $50,000 salary. What is the percentage increase from the difference of $10,000? We plug the numbers into the first formula above to get $60,000 / $50,000 * 100 - 100 = 1.2 * 100 - 100 = 120 - 100 = 20% increase. You can verify this using this online percent increase calculator.

Finally, consider an hourly pay example. If your current rate is $20/h and you are offered a 10% increase, your new hourly rate can be calculated like so: $20 + $20 * 10 / 100 = $20 + $20 * 0.1 = $20 + $2 = $22. On the other hand, if your current hourly rate is $20/h, and you are offered $22/h, what is that in percentage change? Using the formula, we get 22 / 20 * 100 - 100 = 1.1 * 100 - 100 = 110 - 100 = 10% increase.

Business growth examples

Say you are running a small business and you have an average revenue of $20,000 per month by serving 20 customers a month, and you want to increase your revenue by 20%. How many new customers would you need? You need to multiply 20 by 20% and add 20, so that is 5 + 20 = 25. So you would need to serve 5 more customers to a total of 25 customers per month, in order to achieve revenue percentage growth of 20%, assuming that revenue per customer stays the same.

In another example, say you have, on average, 20 new clients per month. However, in December you got 30 new clients, and you want to tell what that is in terms of percentage growth. Of course, it is easiest to use our free online percentage increase calculator, but if you choose to do the math by hand, it is 30 / 20 * 100 - 100 = 1.5 * 100 - 100 = 150 - 100 = 50%. A growth of 10 clients represents a fifty percent increase in the number of new clients.

Calculate price with tax

In another situation you might see a price on an item, but it doesn't have tax (e.g. VAT) included. The price is $10 and you know that there is a 20% tax, and you want to know the final price you need to pay. Using a percent increase calculator you will quickly find that the final price is $12. The price increase was two dollars. Or you can use our specialized VAT calculator instead.

Increase in property value example

In this example use case of our percent increase calculator, you have bought a property worth $500,000 and now its valuation has increased to $550,000 and you want to know what the percentage increase is. You divide the new price by the old price: $550,000 / $500,000 = 1.1, then multiply by 100 to get 110, then subtract 100. The final result is that your property value has increased by 10% over that time period via its gain in value to the amount of 50,000 USD.