Mean Median Mode Calculator

How it works

Mean, median, mode and range are the four most common ways to summarise a list of numbers with a single value each — together the first three are often called measures of central tendency, while range is a basic measure of spread.

Mean is the everyday “average”: add up every value in the dataset, then divide by how many values there are.

Mean = (sum of all values) ÷ (count of values)

Median is the middle value once the numbers are sorted from smallest to largest. If the dataset has an odd number of values, the median is simply the one sitting in the middle. If it has an even number of values, there are two middle numbers instead of one, so the median is their mean. For the odd-sized list 3, 7, 9, 12, 15, the median is the middle value, 9. For the even-sized list 3, 7, 9, 12, there’s no single middle number, so the median is (7 + 9) ÷ 2 = 8.

Mode is whichever value (or values) appears most often. A dataset doesn’t always have exactly one mode — if every value appears exactly once, there’s no mode at all; if two or more values are tied for the highest frequency, the dataset has multiple modes (bimodal for two, multimodal for more).

Range is the simplest measure of spread: the highest value minus the lowest.

Range = highest value − lowest value

It only looks at the two extremes, so a single unusually high or low value can make the range look bigger than the data ‘typically’ spreads — worth reading alongside the mean and median, not instead of them.

Worked example

Maya runs a small café called The Daily Grind in Fremantle, Western Australia. To plan how much milk to order for next week, she counts how many large coffees she sells each day this week:

Day	Coffees sold
Monday	42
Tuesday	38
Wednesday	45
Thursday	42
Friday	51
Saturday	63
Sunday	49

Sorting the week’s sales from lowest to highest gives: 38, 42, 42, 45, 49, 51, 63.

Mean — add up all seven days and divide by 7: 38 + 42 + 42 + 45 + 49 + 51 + 63 = 330, and 330 ÷ 7 = 47.14 coffees a day (rounded to two decimal places).

Median — with 7 values (an odd number), the median is the middle (4th) value in the sorted list: 45.

Mode — 42 appears twice (Monday and Thursday), and every other value appears only once, so the mode is 42.

Range — the busiest day (Saturday, 63) minus the quietest day (Tuesday, 38): 63 − 38 = 25.

Statistic	Value
Mean	47.14 coffees/day
Median	45 coffees
Mode	42 coffees
Range	25 coffees

Maya now has a clearer picture than any single number alone would give her: a typical day sits somewhere around 45–47 coffees, her busiest and quietest days are 25 coffees apart, and the matching 42-coffee tallies on Monday and Thursday are common enough to plan her milk order around.