Rounding Up to the Next Half

Terry has a need to round numbers up to the next 0.5. This means that a number such as 1.1 would round up to 1.5, but 1.6 would round up to 2.0. He tried using MROUND, but it only rounds to the nearest half (1.1 becomes 1.0 and 1.6 becomes 1.5).

Excel provides several different functions that you can use for different rounding purposes, such as ROUND, ROUNDUP, ROUNDDOWN, MROUND, FLOOR, CEILING, etc. Each of these has been discussed fully in other issues of ExcelTips. In this particular instance, CEILING would probably be the best solution:

=CEILING(A1,0.5)

This rounds the value in A1 upwards, to the next half, provided that A1 contains a positive value. If A1 contains a negative value, CEILING still rounds "up," meaning that it rounds toward a higher value. This means that -1.1 would round to 1.0, which is the next higher vmultiple of 0.5. If you, instead, want negative numbers to round away from zero, then you can modify the formula just a bit:

=CEILING(A1,(A1>0)-0.5)

Depending on your version of Excel, you could also rely on the CEILING.MATH function, which allows you to indicate how you want the rounding done:

=CEILING.MATH(A1,0.5,1)

Of course, there are multiple ways to do various tasks in Excel, and this type of rounding is no exception. If you would rather use ROUNDUP instead of CEILING, you could use the following formula:

=ROUNDUP(A1*2,0)/2

If you prefer to use MROUND, you could do the following:

=MROUND(A1+0.24999999,0.5)

This works because you are adding a value (0.249999) that always pushes MROUND over the half-way "tipping point" to force the result upwards.

These are just a few of the easy ways to accomplish the desired result. There are many other ways using the other rounding functions, as well.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11927) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Office 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Rounding Up to the Next Half.