Example 1: Jackson’s intern job at a software company paid $15.42 an hour. He graduated from college and accepted a full-time position from the same company for a larger wage of $35.52 an hour. What is Jackson’s percent increase in pay?
Solution: Using the handy-dandy Percent Change Calculator, dropping the two amounts into it quickly returns a percent pay increase of 130.35%. Here’s how the calculator found the percent increase. We assign the older value to variable A and the newer value to variable B. Units, in this case the dollars, are always stripped or canceled out in percent change problems since we’re looking for increases or decreases in percentage. So in the first part of the equation we take 35.52 and subtract 15.42 from it and get 20.10. Then we divide that amount by the original older value and get 1.3035. Now we must convert that number to a percent by multiplying it by 100. That gives us a percent increase answer of 130.35%. Formula Completed: [(35.52-15.42)/15.42) x 100] = 130.35%
