Average Rating Calculator

The average rating calculator takes a number of votes for each rating (1 star, 2 stars, 3 stars, 4 stars, 5 stars) and gives you the mean rating. This is an example of taking the weighted average, where the number of votes for each category are weighted by their score (i.e., 3 votes for 5 stars have a weight of 15, 6 votes for 4 stars have a weight of 24 etc.). An example of non-typical usage of our 5 star rating calculator would be when you have a certain number of 1-4 ratings and you want to find out how many new 5-star votes you need in order to achieve a certain mean rating.

You may also be interested in our average calculator, or in another example of a weighted average problem. Our college GPA calculator is perfect when you want to know what your current grade is, or what you need to do to achieve your desired GPA. When calculating this, grades are weighted based on the number of credits.

The formula for the average 5-star rating reads:

average rating = (5r₅ + 4r₄ + 3r₃ + 2r₂ + r₁) / (r₅ + r₄ + r₃ + r₂ + r₁),

where r_i is the number of i stars responses for i = 1, ..., 5.

To determine the average 5-star rating, you need to:

1. Gather the data: write down how many five stars you got, how many four stars, etc.
2. Add together all numbers from Step 1. This is the total number of responses.
3. Multiply the number of five stars by 5, the number of four stars by 4, etc.
4. Add together all numbers from Step 3. This is your total rating.
5. Divide the number from Step 4 by that from Step 2. This is your average rating!

The best rating is around 4.2 - 4.5. Research showed these ratings are the most influential and most trusted. The rating of 5 raises doubts in customers' minds, who think it is "too good to be true".

You need to consistently get a rating of at least four stars (so 4 stars or 5 stars). The number of good reviews you need to raise the average depends on how many you've already had. In general, the more bad or average reviews you got in the past, the more good or perfect reviews you need now to raise the average rating.