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MROUND, CEILING & FLOOR

Math & rounding

Round to a multiple — price points, pack sizes, round thousands — not to decimal places.

Difficulty

Amateur

Excel file

1What is it?

ROUND works in decimal places. Business rounds to MULTIPLES: prices end in .99 or in fives, stock ships in packs of 12, a board pack reports to the nearest thousand. MROUND rounds to the nearest multiple you name; CEILING always rounds up to one, which is what you want when you can't order half a pack; FLOOR always rounds down, which is what you want for a price tier you mustn't exceed. The trap is signs: MROUND refuses a negative number with a positive multiple, which bites the first time it meets a credit note.

2What it looks like

MROUND(number, multiple)   ·   CEILING.MATH(number, [significance])   ·   FLOOR.MATH(number, [significance])

number: The value to round.
multiple / significance: What to round to a multiple of — 5, 12, 1000, 0.25. Defaults to 1 for CEILING.MATH and FLOOR.MATH.

3When you use it

Round a calculated price to the nearest $5 price point.
Round an order quantity UP to a whole number of packs.
Report figures to the nearest thousand without changing the underlying model.

4See it in action

Change the inputs — the formula and result update live. Prefer the real thing? Download the Excel file and open it in Excel.

Change the number and the multiple. Try a negative, like a credit note.

=CEILING.MATH(A2, 12)MROUND: 36

	A
1	Result
2	MROUND: 36
3	CEILING.MATH: 48 — always up (whole packs)
4	FLOOR.MATH: 36 — always down (a tier you mustn't exceed)
5	Try -38 to meet MROUND's sign trap.

The lime cell holds the formula — click it (or any cell) to see its contents in the bar above, just like Excel. Edit the blue cells to watch it recompute.

Number

Multiple

5Common errors

#NUM!MROUND got a negative number and a positive multiple — a credit note, a refund, a loss.

Fix: Match the signs: MROUND(A2, SIGN(A2)*5). Or use CEILING.MATH / FLOOR.MATH, which handle negatives.

Rounded the wrong way on negativesLegacy CEILING and FLOOR round negatives toward or away from zero inconsistently between versions.

Fix: Use the .MATH versions, which behave the same everywhere.

Totals no longer add upEach line was rounded, then summed — so the rounded total differs from the rounded sum.

Fix: Round the total separately, or round only in the presentation layer with a number format.

Needed a display, rounded the valueRounding to thousands changed the number other formulas read.

Fix: For display only, a custom format like #,##0, shows thousands without changing anything. See the tip.

6Better functions & alternatives

ROUND / ROUNDUP / ROUNDDOWN — For decimal places rather than multiples.
A custom number format — #,##0, displays thousands while leaving the value untouched — often what "round to thousands" really means.

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