Percentage calculator
What is this much of that — GST, a discount, a hike, or what share of my income something takes?
18 is GST. 10 is the rent revision. 30 is the savings rate worth aiming at.
The figure to measure the amount against — take-home pay, last year's bill, the older price.
₹7,560is 18% of ₹42,000
- Add it on
- ₹49,560
- Take it off
- ₹34,440
- As a share of the comparison
- 16.5%
- Change from the comparison
- -83.5%
- That much₹7,560 · 18%
- The rest₹34,440 · 82%
| Percent | That much | The rest |
|---|---|---|
| 18% | ₹7,560 | ₹34,440 |
A percentage is always a percentage *of* something, and most of the trouble comes from losing track of which something. This is a worksheet, not a single sum: put in an amount, a rate, and a figure to measure it against, and it answers four questions at once — how much the rate comes to, the amount with the rate added on, the amount with it taken off, and how the amount stands next to the comparison, both as a share and as a rise or fall. Nothing is locked behind a mode switch, so the tax, the discount, the hike and the share are all on the page together.
A worked example
A school raises the annual fee to ₹96,000. Last year it was ₹84,000, and the circular calls the increase 12.5%. Put those three in the fields above — amount ₹96,000, percent 12.5, compared with ₹84,000 — and the page returns:
- ₹12,000 — what 12.5% of ₹96,000 comes to
- ₹1,08,000 with it added on, ₹84,000 with it taken off
- the new fee is 114.3% of last year’s
- the change from last year is a rise of 14.3%
- ₹12,000 12.5% of the new fee
- ₹84,000 The rest of it
The same two numbers the donut above draws — the slice, and what is left of the amount.
Look at the last two figures again. The circular said 12.5%; the calculator says the fee went up 14.3%. Both are arithmetically correct, and only one of them is what happened to your money.
12.5% of which number?
Twelve and a half percent of the new fee is ₹12,000, and ₹96,000 minus ₹12,000 is exactly last year’s ₹84,000 — which is what makes the school’s figure defensible on paper. But you did not pay a percentage of the new fee last year. You paid ₹84,000, and the rise has to be measured against that.
Set amount to ₹84,000 and percent to 12.5 to read the middle row off the tool. The ₹1,500 gap is the whole trick: a percentage taken off the bigger figure is not the same percentage added to the smaller one.
The rule worth carrying out of this: whenever a percentage is quoted at you, ask what it was calculated on. A discount off the MRP is not a discount off the price you were going to be charged anyway; a hike measured on the new salary is not the hike you got.
What these figures do not account for
Percentages are pure arithmetic — they are true about the numbers you typed and say nothing about the money underneath them.
Nothing compounds here
A rate applied once is all this does. Ten percent a year for three years is not 30% — it is 33.1%, and over long spans the gap swamps the arithmetic. For a return spread over years, use CAGR, not a percent change.
Tax taken off is not tax settled
The "take it off" figure is a deduction, not a liability. TDS on bank interest is withheld under section 194A and credited to you in Form 26AS; whether you owe more or get a refund depends on your slab and regime, not on the percentage the payer applied.
Inclusive versus exclusive
If the figure you typed already contains the tax, service charge or cess, "add it on" charges it twice and "take it off" removes too much. Divide by one-plus-the-rate to strip an inclusive amount; only add on to a base you know is clean.
A percent of what, over what period
A flat 8% on a loan and 8% reducing are different prices; a 7% annual rate quoted on a two-month deposit is not 7% of the money. This tool takes a rate and an amount at face value — the period and the basis are yours to check.
One more, on the share figure. It is a ratio of two numbers at a single moment, so it inherits whatever those two numbers left out. A rent-to-income share built on gross pay rather than take-home flatters you; a savings rate that counts an annual insurance premium in the one month it is paid will look alarming in that month and rosy in the other eleven. Compare like with like, and over the same span.
Where to go next
For a bill rather than a bare rate, the GST calculator does the inclusive-and-exclusive split properly instead of leaving you to divide by 1.18. For growth that happened over several years, the CAGR calculator turns the total change into the annual rate a percent change cannot give you. And if the percentage in question is a raise, the salary calculator shows what actually reaches your account after the deductions the hike also moves.
How do I remove GST from a price that already includes it?
Not with the "take it off" figure — that is the commonest percentage mistake there is. Taking 18% off an inclusive total removes 18% of the total, but the tax was 18% of the smaller pre-tax price, so you end up below the real base. Divide the inclusive amount by 1.18 instead to get the taxable value, and the difference is the tax. Use the calculator the other way round: put the base in the amount field and read "add it on" until it matches the bill. And check which rate is notified for your item under the GST rate schedules before you assume 18% — the slabs have been revised more than once.
Is a 10% rise followed by a 10% fall back to where it started?
No, and the gap is always a loss, whichever order you do it in. The rise is calculated on the smaller starting figure and the fall on the bigger one that results, so the second percentage moves more rupees than the first. A salary cut of 10% needs a raise of about 11.1% to undo it, and a 20% cut needs 25%. This is why "we will restore it later" is worth reading carefully.
What is the difference between percent and percentage points?
A percentage point is the arithmetic gap between two rates; a percent is a proportion of one of them. If a lending rate moves from 6.50% to 6.75%, that is a rise of 0.25 percentage points — but only a 3.8% increase in the rate itself. Lenders and news reports use whichever sounds larger, so check which one is on the page before you react to it. This calculator measures the second kind: put the old rate in the comparison field and the new one in the amount field, and the "change" figure is the percent, not the points.
What percentage of my income should my rent or my EMI be?
There is no legal ceiling, so treat any single number you read as a convention rather than a rule. What is checkable is what your own lender will use: banks size a retail loan off a fixed-obligation-to-income ratio, counting every EMI you already pay against your net monthly income, and that ratio is stated in the lender's own credit policy — ask for it. Put your monthly commitment in the amount field and your take-home in the comparison field, and the share figure is the number they will be looking at.
Why does the calculator show a dash instead of a percentage?
Because the comparison figure is zero, and a share of nothing has no answer. So does a change measured from nothing — a jump from ₹0 to any amount is not an infinite percentage, it is a percentage that does not exist. The page prints a dash rather than a confident 0%. Put a real figure in the comparison field and both rows fill in.
This page starts from typical figures. In Hundo the same calculator opens on your own — the loan, the deposit, the salary already on the ledger — and says where each number came from.