Per mill and percentage - conversion of percentage % to permille ‰ and vise versa
Percentage and per mill (‰) are both dimensionless units, which express a portion of a whole
A percent is one hundredth of a whole, per mill is one thousandth of a whole.
From that, it is clear that the conversion between percent and per mill is one decimal point.
In practice that means:
- If a driver is has a blood alcohol level in blood of 2 ‰ is the equivalent to 0.2% alcohol.
- Or the other way around, if 0.5% of students failed it is equivalent to 5‰ or 5 per mill.
Even thought per mill is mostly associated with alcohol, it cab be used in any situation when wanting to express a part of a whole, same as percentage.
Per mill is a unit that is appropriate when talking about a very small part of a whole and percentage values should have around one decimal place.
For example we can say that 1‰ of the population are infected, which means 0.1% of the population.
Parts per million
There is one more unit used to express a portion of a whole, known as ppm (from parts per million), in other words one millionth.
For example, in the year 2021 more than 1 ppm of Czechs owned property valuing over 25 billion Czech Crowns.
This statement means that if we take the population of the Czech Republic at around 10.7 million, then about 11 Czechs owned property valued at over 25 billion Czech Crowns.
Calculator - from percentage to per mill and vise versa
The calculator converts percentage to per mill and per mill to percentage. A value only needs to be put in and then choose either percent to per mill or per mill to percent.
How do percentage and per mill calculations works
For a better understanding lets look at some example:
IF there are 1000 cars on a parking lot and 1 car leaves, we can say that 1‰ (per mill) or 10% cars left overall.
How we came to that:
- Take a whole, or how many cars there are on a parking lot (1000 cars)
- We divide this whole by:
- 100, if we want to find 1%
- 1000, if we want to find 1 ‰
What if we want to find out more than 1 percent or 1 per mill:
We take the same initial steps, only multiplying the result by the number of percent or per mill we want to find.
Continuing with the parking lot example, if we want to find how many cars would have to leave in order to free up 20%:
- find 1% by dividing 1000 (whole) by 100, which is 10
- multiply by 20, to find 20% which is 200
- so, 200 cars would have to leave to free up 20% of the parking lot
And if we wanted to find how many cars would have to leave the parking lot in order to free up 20 ‰, we follow the same steps but divide the whole by 1000:
- find 1‰ by dividing 1000 (whole) by 1000, which is 1
- multiply by 20, to find 20‰ which is 20
- so, 20 cars would have to leave to free up 20‰ of the parking lot
Note how the difference between percentage and per mill values is one decimal place, in reality this means that if a driver has a measured alcohol content of 2‰, it is equivalent 0.2% blood alcohol content, which we can imagine much better.
Per mill and percentage conversion questions and answers
What countries use per mill for blood alcohol content?
All European countries besides the United Kingdom use per mill for alcohol content, either by mass or volume.
What is the conversion between percent and per mill?
The conversion rate is one decimal point.
