Percentage to Letter Grade Calculator

How to use this percentage to letter grade calculator

Type the percentage in and the letter appears straight away. The box opens on 87 on purpose. It is the value where the standard chart and Baruch College’s published scale disagree, so the point of the page is on screen before you touch anything.

1. Put the percentage in. Decimals are fine and they are not rounded first. An 89.5 is treated as 89.5, which matters more than it sounds.
2. Pick the scale. Plus/minus is the standard chart, and the one this page opens on. Whole letters has no pluses or minuses. Baruch College is a real published college scale, included because it disagrees with the standard one. Custom lets you type your own four cutoffs.
3. Read the two distances. Under the letter you get the band it sits in and the grade points it is worth. Under that sit the two numbers: how much more you need to reach the next letter up, and how much you can lose before it drops to the next one down.

The table underneath lists the percentages either side of yours and marks where each letter begins, so you can see which side of the boundary you are on rather than guessing.

The standard chart, and the answer most people want

If you came here to learn that 87 percent is a B plus and then leave, that is the answer on the standard plus/minus scale, and you are done. Here it is in full.

That scale has twelve cutoffs. An A plus starts at 97, an A at 93, an A minus at 90, a B plus at 87, a B at 83, a B minus at 80, a C plus at 77, a C at 73, a C minus at 70, a D plus at 67, a D at 63 and a D minus at 60. Anything under 60 is an F.

Drop the pluses and minuses and the whole thing collapses to four cutoffs: 90, 80, 70 and 60. High schools and colleges do not always pick the same one, so the chart below carries both columns. That is why the same 87 can be reported to you as a B in one place and a B plus in another without anybody making a mistake.

People call this a percent to letter grade calculator too, or a percentage to grade calculator. The job is the same either way: match a number to a band, using somebody’s cutoffs.

The rest of this page is for the case where that answer turns out not to be the one your school would give you.

Every percentage from 100 down to 60

Conversion charts are built from bands. A band tells you where a letter starts; a row tells you your answer. This one gives every whole percentage its own row, on both the plus/minus scale and the whole-letter scale, with the grade points that letter is worth on a 4.0 scale.

It stops at 60 and then catches everything below in one row, because under 60 the letter stops changing. Another sixty rows all reading F would be padding, not information.

The grade points column is the value that letter carries on a 4.0 scale, the same number a GPA is built from. Your school may weight honors or AP courses above it, which is a separate calculation and not part of the conversion itself.

Why some colleges never publish a percentage

The assumption behind every conversion chart is that somewhere there is an official table saying 90 is an A. At some universities there is not, and the policy that exists instead says something quite different.

We counted it across the 100 largest US institutions. Only 10 publish a band, and what a 90 actually earns varies by college: at four of them it is a full A, at five an A minus, and at one it is neither.

Georgia Tech’s catalog sets out its grades in words and quality points, not percentages. An A is defined as Excellent and worth four quality points, a B as Good and worth three, a C as Satisfactory and worth two, a D as Passing and worth one, and an F as Failure and worth none. There is no institution-wide percentage anywhere in it. Instead the catalog tells instructors to state on their own syllabus what percentage earns each letter in that particular course.

The University of North Carolina at Charlotte does the same thing in its undergraduate grading policy, last revised in January 2022. An A is Excellent, a B is Good, a C is Fair, a D is Passing and an F is Failing. No percentage cutoffs are stated. The policy is careful about arithmetic elsewhere, so this is not an oversight. It specifies that grade point averages are reported to two decimal places and should be truncated when shortened, never rounded up.

Read those two together and the shape of the problem changes. The question is bigger than which chart your school uses. At institutions like these the percentage that earns an A is set course by course, by the person teaching it, and written into the syllabus you were handed in week one. A calculator cannot know that number. What it can do is take the number once you find it, which is what the Custom option is for.

When a college does publish one, the numbers move

Some institutions do publish a percentage table. When they do, read the numbers rather than assume them. Baruch College, part of the City University of New York, prints its full scale in the undergraduate catalog.

Look at where the B plus begins. Not 87, but 87.1. An 87.0 at Baruch is a B, and the standard chart above would have told you it was a B plus. The same gap appears twice more: a C runs to 77.0 with the C plus starting at 77.1, and a D runs to 67.0 with the D plus starting at 67.1.

The D band is the other thing worth noticing. It covers 60.0 to 67.0, seven full points, while a B minus covers 80.0 to 82.9, under three. Letter bands are not required to be the same width and here they plainly are not.

None of this makes Baruch unusual or wrong. It makes the standard chart a convention rather than a rule. Switch the calculator above to the Baruch scale and type 87, and you can watch the letter change.

How close you are to the next letter

A letter on its own hides the thing you probably want to know, which is whether you are safe. Two numbers sit under every result for that reason.

The first is how much more you need to reach the next letter up. The second is how far you can fall before you drop to the next letter down. Type 87 on the plus/minus scale and the second number reads zero. An 87 is exactly on the B plus line, so an 86.99 is a B. Nothing about the letter B plus on its own tells you that you are standing on the edge of it.

The same reading explains the question people ask about halves. An 89.5 is a B plus on the plus/minus scale, because the A minus does not start until 90, and the calculator will tell you it is 0.5 away. Whether your instructor rounds that 89.5 up to a 90 before applying the scale is a separate decision that belongs to them, not to the chart. Ask before grades are final rather than after.

The band shown next to the letter is written as a range that stops just under the next cutoff, rather than at a whole number, for the same reason. A B plus is 87 to just under 90, not 87 to 89, because 89.4 is in it too.

The schools that award no A plus, and the ones with no pluses at all

Before you convert a percentage to a letter, check that the letter you are converting to exists where you study.

Baruch’s published scale, above, has no A plus. Its top grade is a plain A, starting at 93. A converter that hands back an A plus for a 98 is giving a grade that college does not issue.

Georgia Tech goes further. Its catalog lists five grades: A, B, C, D and F. No plus or minus grades appear anywhere in it. On a scale like that the entire question of whether 87 is a B or a B plus stops existing, because there is no B plus to be had. That is what the whole-letter option in the calculator is for.

This cuts both ways for grade points too. On a scale with no A plus, a perfect score and a 93 carry the same four points. On a plus/minus scale the difference between an 89 and a 90 is worth 0.4 of a grade point, which is a large gap for a single percentage point.

Where to go next

Converting one percentage is a small part of a bigger job. The steps on either side of it live elsewhere on this site.

• If you are starting from points rather than a percentage, you need to turn points into a percentage first, and that page does the division and shows the working.
• To convert several scores and then average a set of letter grades into one, including averaging them by credit hours, use the letter grade tool.
• If the scale itself is what changes rather than the format, you can move a grade from one scale to another and see what the conversion loses.

Built and maintained by Mahmudul, the creator of Calculate Your Grade. Last reviewed September 2026.

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