Average Calculator
Paste or type your numbers and get the mean, median, mode and range, with the sorted data set and the running sum. Separate the numbers with commas, spaces or line breaks — mixed formats are fine.
Separators can be commas, spaces, semicolons or line breaks — blank entries are ignored.
Formula and calculation
Worked example
For the data set 12, 15, 15, 17, 19, 21 the mean is 16.5 and the median is 16 — with six values the median is the average of the third and fourth. 15 appears most often, and the whole set spans a range of 9.
When the mean misleads
Ten people in a room, nine earning $40,000 and one earning $1,000,000. The mean income is $136,000 — a number that describes nobody in the room, because a single value drags it upward. The median is $40,000, which is what a typical person actually earns. House prices, salaries and waiting times all behave this way: when a distribution has a long tail, report the median and say so. The gap between the mean and the median is itself a useful signal of how skewed your data is.
Which average should you report?
Use the mean when the data is roughly symmetric and every value should count (test scores, temperatures, measurement repeats). Use the median when a few extreme values could distort the picture (incomes, prices, response times). Use the mode when you care about the most common category — the most frequent shoe size to stock, or the most common number of visits. Reporting all three, as this page does, takes a second and removes the guesswork.
What the results mean
- Mean (average)
- The arithmetic average: the sum of the values divided by how many there are. It is the number most people mean by “average”, and it moves with every extreme value.
- Median
- The middle value once the data is sorted. With an even count it is the average of the two middle values, so it can land between two data points. Outliers barely move it.
- Mode
- The value that appears most often. A data set can have several modes, listed smallest first, or none at all when every value appears exactly once.
- Range (max − min)
- The largest value minus the smallest — how wide the data set stretches from end to end.
- Sum
- The total of all the values, which is the first step of the mean.
- Count (n)
- How many numbers were read. Blank lines and repeated separators are ignored.
- Sorted data set
- Your data set in ascending order. The median and mode were read off this list, so it doubles as a check that everything was parsed the way you meant.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between mean, median and mode?
The mean is the total divided by the count; the median is the middle value of the sorted list; the mode is the value that appears most often. For 2, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5, 7, 9 they are 5, 4.5 and 4 respectively.
How do I find the median with an even number of values?
Sort the data, then average the two middle values. For 2, 4, 5, 9 the middle pair is 4 and 5, so the median is 4.5 — a number that does not appear in the data, which is normal and expected.
Can a data set have more than one mode?
Yes. In 1, 2, 2, 3, 3, 4 both 2 and 3 appear twice, so both are modes — the data is bimodal. If every value appears the same number of times, there is no mode at all, and the calculator says so instead of picking one.
How many numbers can I enter?
Up to 1,000. A single number is accepted too — its mean and median are the number itself, the range is zero, and there is no mode. Separators can be mixed inside one list — commas, spaces and line breaks all work, and blank lines are ignored.