Average (Mean, Median, Mode) Calculator

"Average" usually refers to the mean, but mean, median, and mode are three different ways of describing the center of a dataset, and each tells you something the others don't. This calculator computes all three at once, plus the range and min/max, from any list of numbers you enter.

The mean is the sum of all values divided by how many there are: for 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42, the sum is 108 and there are 6 numbers, so the mean is 108 ÷ 6 = 18.

The median is the middle value when the numbers are sorted — for an odd count, it's the single middle number; for an even count (like the example above), it's the average of the two middle numbers. Sorted, that list is 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42, so the median is (15 + 16) ÷ 2 = 15.5.

The mode is the most frequently occurring value. If every number in the list appears exactly once, there's no mode at all; if two or more values tie for the most frequent, the dataset is called multimodal and all of them are shown.

Mean and median can tell very different stories, especially with outliers: household income data is a classic example — a handful of very high earners pull the mean well above what a "typical" household earns, while the median (the middle household) isn't affected by those extremes at all. When a dataset has outliers, median is usually the more representative "typical value."

Range (max − min) shows how spread out the data is at the extremes, which is a useful quick companion to mean and median when you want a sense of the data's overall spread, not just its center.

This calculator treats every value equally when computing the mean — a weighted average, by contrast, gives some values more influence than others (like a course grade where the final exam counts more than a quiz). If you need standard deviation or variance — a measure of how spread out values are around the mean, beyond just the range — the Standard Deviation Calculator builds directly on the same mean this tool computes.