Average Calculator
Enter any list of numbers to instantly get mean (average), median (middle value), mode (most frequent), range, and standard deviation. Useful for students, teachers, data analysts, and anyone who needs quick descriptive statistics.
Frequently Asked Questions
When should I use mean vs median?+
Mean (average) is best when data has no extreme outliers. Median is better for skewed distributions or when outliers exist — e.g., median income is more representative than mean income (because a few billionaires don't distort it). Mode is useful for categorical data or finding the most common value.
What does standard deviation tell you?+
Standard deviation measures how spread out numbers are around the mean. Low SD means values are clustered close to the mean. High SD means values are spread wide. In a normal distribution: 68% of values fall within ±1 SD, 95% within ±2 SD, 99.7% within ±3 SD.
What is the difference between population and sample variance?+
This calculator computes population variance (divide by n). For sample variance (a subset of a larger population), divide by n−1 instead (Bessel's correction). For most practical purposes with large datasets, the difference is negligible.