I'm a web developer who got tired of opening a tab, dismissing a cookie banner, watching three ad units load, and waiting for a 4 MB JavaScript bundle just to find out what 23% of 880 is. So I built the page you're on right now: a percentage calculator that runs entirely in your browser, ships in roughly 80 KB of code, and never sends a single number you type to any server.
That second part matters. When the inputs are your salary negotiation, your business margin, your mortgage offer or your investment portfolio, you shouldn't have to trust a third-party host with the numbers just to do middle-school arithmetic. Every calculator on this page is a few hundred lines of vanilla JavaScript that crunches the result in front of you. No accounts, no analytics on the math itself, no server round-trips.
The rest of this page — the lessons, the guides, the conversion tables, the quiz — is what I wished existed when I was first learning this stuff. The four case studies below are the situations my friends and I keep hitting in real life, with the exact calculator that handles each one.
01
Pay rises that don't keep up with prices
Inflation has settled into the 2–4% range across most of the EU and the US through 2025–2026, but the cumulative bite from the 2022–2023 spike is still working through paychecks. If you got a 5% raise last year and a 3% raise this year, that compounds to 8.15% — not 8%. If headline inflation ran 4% then 3% over the same period, your real purchasing power moved by only ~1% in two years, not 3%.
Use the Percentage Change tab to compare last year's salary to this year's gross. Then run an inflation-adjusted check by comparing the same number against the country's published CPI for that period. The gap between the two is your real raise.
Calculator: Percent change, applied twice.
02
The "20% off, then 15% off" trap
Retailers love stacking discounts. The signage will say "20% off everything, an extra 15% off at checkout" and your brain will hear 35%. It isn't. A 20% cut leaves 80% of the price; another 15% off that leaves 85% of the new price. Multiply: 0.80 × 0.85 = 0.68. You're paying 68% of sticker — a 32% discount, not 35%.
The Discount Calculator handles each layer in one go. For the stacked case run it twice: original → first sale price → second sale price. Watch the "you save" line. The difference between the headline math and the real math is usually 1–3 percentage points, which on a €1,200 laptop is real money.
Calculator: Discount, applied per layer.
03
Mortgage payments after the rate reset
Anyone who locked in a 30-year mortgage at 2.5–3.0% during 2020–2021 and is now refinancing in 2026 is looking at rates in the 5–7% range depending on country and credit. The headline jump sounds manageable — "rates doubled" — but the compounding bite over 30 years is brutal. On a $300,000 balance, the difference between 3% and 6% across the full term is north of $200,000 in lifetime interest.
Run the numbers on the Finance page: both the Loan/EMI calculator (monthly payment, total interest, amortization chart) and the Compound Interest calculator (what that "rate doubled" actually means after 10, 20, 30 years). The chart at the bottom is the part most people haven't seen before — it shows exactly when interest stops dominating principal in the payment.
Calculator: Loan/EMI + Compound Interest.
04
Tip math at a 12-person dinner
Splitting a large bill is the most common percentage task most adults do, and it's the one we get wrong most often — because most calculators don't actually split. They give you the total tip, you guess what to put on your card, and someone always ends up subsidising the table.
The Tip Calculator takes the bill, the percentage and the number of people, and shows three numbers: tip, total, per person. The 10/15/18/20% preset buttons cover the common cases instantly, and the share button copies a one-line summary you can drop into any group chat ("Bill $312, 18% tip = $55.80, total $367.80, $30.65 each across 12").
Calculator: Tip splitter with quick presets.
What you won't find on this page
- A signup wall. Nothing here is gated. No "create an account to save your history" — your history saves to your browser, on your machine, and stays there.
- Tracking of the math itself. The numbers you type into the calculator never leave your device. We log anonymous page visits (the standard kind any web host does), and that's the whole telemetry story.
- Affiliate links inside the math. No "click here to refinance" links wired into the loan calculator. The results are the results.
- Newsletter dark patterns. The newsletter signup at the bottom of the page is single-checkbox, double opt-in, with an unsubscribe link in every email and an instant-removal endpoint at
/unsubscribe.
The site is funded by a single AdSense slot per long page (one on the homepage, one inside lessons, one inside guides) and by the optional Chrome extension. If something on the page ever feels misaligned with the trust statements above, the contact form is the place to flag it — I read every message.
Built and maintained by the FreePercentCalc team, with input from math educators and finance professionals. Last review of this page: May 2026.