Calculate the sale price after a discount, or find the discount percentage between two prices.
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Calculating a discounted price is a simple but extremely commonly used tool in everyday shopping and retail, usable in two directions: first, finding the final sale price after applying a specific discount percentage to the original price, using the formula sale price = original price × (1 − discount percentage); and second, working backward to find the actual discount percentage being offered if you know only the original and final prices but not the advertised percentage — useful for verifying whether an advertised "sale" is really as generous as it claims. This tool supports both directions in a single form, which is useful whether you're comparing shopping deals as a consumer or setting promotional pricing as a business, and it's worth noting that retailers sometimes apply discounts to an inflated "original" price, which is exactly the kind of discrepancy that working the calculation in both directions can help a careful shopper spot.
A discount percentage looks simple on a price tag, but the actual math behind it — and the potential for the underlying "original" price to be inflated — is worth understanding before treating any advertised sale as automatically the best deal.
The forward calculation is straightforward: take the original price, multiply by one minus the discount percentage, and you get the final sale price. A $100 item at 30% off becomes $70. This works cleanly and predictably as long as the original price itself is trustworthy — which isn't always a safe assumption in retail.
The reverse calculation, working out the actual discount percentage from an original and final price, becomes useful precisely because retailers occasionally raise a price shortly before a sale, then advertise a large discount off that newly inflated figure rather than off a genuinely typical price. Comparing the sale price against a longer price history, where available, or simply against a competitor's regular price for the same item, is a more reliable check than trusting the advertised percentage alone.
Stacked or sequential discounts are another common point of confusion. A "30% off, then an extra 20% off" doesn't add up to 50% off — the second discount applies to the already-discounted price, so the combined effect is actually a 44% total reduction (0.7 × 0.8 = 0.56, meaning 56% of the original price remains). Multiplying discount percentages together rather than adding them is the correct way to calculate genuinely stacked discounts.
For businesses setting promotional prices rather than shopping for them, the same math works in reverse: deciding on a target final price and working out what discount percentage from the regular price achieves it, or deciding on a discount percentage and checking what margin remains once that discount is applied against the cost of goods sold, to make sure the promotion doesn't accidentally sell below cost.
For sequential discounts (like 20% then an extra 10%), apply this calculator twice — once for each discount, using the result of the first as the original price for the second.
Fill in either the discount percentage or the sale price, not both — leave the one you don't know empty.
Enter the sale price and original price in the calculator's reverse fields (if available) — otherwise divide the discount amount by the original price and multiply by 100.