ROUND Function – Google Sheets

The ROUND function in Google Sheets rounds a number to a specified number of decimal places.

Notes

The function uses standard rounding rules, meaning that it rounds positive numbers down if they are below five and up if they are five or above. The function also rounds away from zero for negative numbers.

Rounding positive and negatives away from zero
Rounding Away from Zero

⚠️ The ROUND function changes a number’s value, while number formatting changes its display. If you remove decimal places with formatting, the full value of the number is still there, but you don’t see it. But, if you remove decimal places with this function, the decimal values are permanently gone.

Syntax

=ROUND(value, [places])

  • value – The number that you want to round.
  • places – Optional. The number of decimal places that you want to round to. If you don’t specify a place value, the default is 0.

Similar Functions

Several functions deal with rounding. Choose the most appropriate for your use.

  • CEILING.MATH – Rounds a number up to the nearest integer multiple of specified significance with customizable negative number treatment
  • CEILING.PRECISE – Rounds a number up to the nearest integer multiple of specified significance
  • INT – Rounds a number down to the nearest integer
  • FLOOR.MATH – Rounds a number down to the nearest integer multiple of specified significance with customizable negative number treatment
  • FLOOR.PRECISE – Rounds a number down to the nearest integer multiple of specified significance
  • MROUND – Rounds a number to the nearest multiple of another number
  • ROUND – Rounds a number to a specified number of decimal places using standard rounding
  • ROUNDDOWN – Round a number down to a specified number of places
  • ROUNDUP – Round a number up to a specified number of places
  • TRUNC: Truncates a number to a certain number of significant digits by omitting less significant digits

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Examples

The syntax for this function is relatively simple. However, we must look at several examples to understand how it works.

Example 1 – Round to Two Decimal Places

Let’s start with a single, straight-forward example of rounding the number 123.4567 to two decimal places:

=ROUND(123.4567, 2)

This function will return the value of 123.46.

Example 2 – Round to Nearest Integer

You can also use the ROUND function to round numbers to the nearest integer. To do this, set the value for places to 0. For example, the following formula will round the number 123.4567 to the nearest integer:

=ROUND(123.4567, 0)

This example will return the value 123. This behavior is similar to the INT function. Next, let’s look at an example where it behaves differently than INT.

Example 3 – Round to Different Place Values

Now that we’ve seen a few examples to understand the basics let’s try different values for the places argument using 123.45 every time. We’ll see different levels of rounding as a result.

Using the ROUND function with different inputs for places
Rounding to Different Places

Column C has no formatting applied, so only the ROUND function drives the results.

Rows 2 and 3 have the same result even though the places arguments (3 and 2) are different. This difference is because Google Sheets only shows decimal places to the last significant digit unless you apply formatting to force Google Sheets to show insignificant digits. Therefore, the 123.450 in row 2 is only shown as 123.45 since the ending 0 does not impact the number’s value.

Google Sheets rounds the results in rows 4 and 5 to 1 and 0 decimal places, respectively. Remember that the 123.5 and the 123 are the new values, with the decimal values discarded. If you change the formatting of column C to show more decimal values, they will be zeroes.

The negative values for places in rows 6 and 7 are removing significant digits in the ones and tens. These results show that the ROUND function can remove more than decimals if you use a negative number for the places argument.

The example in the last row rounds the value down far enough that there are no significant digits. Because 123.45 is less than 500, Google Sheets rounds it down to 0 instead of up to 1,000.

Example 4 – Round a Negative Number

This function also rounds negative numbers. Let’s take the previous example and change the sign to negative.

=ROUND(-123.4567, 0)

This formula returns the value -123, which is a different result than the INT provides. Read more about the difference between the two functions in Google Sheets.

Live Examples in Google Sheets

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