Discount percentage

What it's for

Faced with a tag showing the old price crossed out and the new one next to it, the question is always the same: how big is the discount really? From 89 to 62 looks like a lot, but it's 30%; from 120 to 99 looks small and it's 17.5%. Here you type the two prices and see the percentage and the money saved together, which are two different ways of looking at the same thing and convince different people.

The thing to check before the percentage

It isn't how big the discount is: it's which price it starts from. A starting price inflated a few days before the sales makes any percentage look large, which is why Europe has a precise rule: when a shop announces a reduction, the crossed-out price must be the lowest one applied in the previous thirty days. It's the European price directive (transposed in Italy in 2023 into the consumer code) and it applies both in shops and online.

The practical way to check is to compare it with what you remember seeing, or with another shop: if you've never seen anyone charged the full price, that percentage is measuring an invented number.

The arithmetic, to redo it in your head

Discount percentage = (full price − discounted price) ÷ full price × 100. The division goes on the full price, and that's the commonest mistake: dividing by the discounted price gives a bigger, wrong number. From 100 to 80 the discount is 20% (twenty divided by a hundred), not 25.

Nearby tools

If instead you have the full price and the percentage and want the final price, the page is Discount calculator; to apply any increase or reduction there is Increase or reduce by a %. To compare two packs of different weight, which is the other way people think they're saving and aren't, there is Price per kg.