Mean Absolute Deviation Calculator

About this calculator

This calculator finds the mean absolute deviation (MAD) of a dataset — the average distance of each value from the mean, ignoring the sign of the difference. It's calculated by taking the mean, subtracting it from every value, taking the absolute value of each difference, and averaging those.

Statistics students use it as a simpler alternative to standard deviation for measuring how spread out a dataset is, and analysts use it to gauge forecast accuracy or data consistency without letting a single outlier square away the picture. Paste in a list of numbers to get the MAD along with the mean it was built from.