Percentage Complete
Percentage Complete tells you how far along your project is in terms of the budgeted work you have accomplished. It answers the friendly question: 'What portion of the whole job have we actually earned so far?' It is expressed as a percentage from 0% (nothing done) to 100% (everything done).
To calculate it, you take the Earned Value (EV) — which is the budgeted value of the work you have genuinely completed — and divide it by the Budget at Completion (BAC), which is the total approved budget for the entire project. Then you multiply by 100 to turn that fraction into a percentage. In words: 'value of work done, divided by the total planned value of all the work, times one hundred.'
Reading it is intuitive: a higher percentage means you are further along, and a lower percentage means you have more work remaining. A project manager uses this to report progress to stakeholders in a simple, easy-to-grasp number, and to sanity-check schedules — for example, if you are supposedly 80% through your timeline but only 40% complete by value, that is an early warning sign that work is lagging.
Think of it like a progress bar when downloading a large file. The bar fills based on how much of the total has actually been received, giving you an instant, at-a-glance sense of how much is done and how much is still to come.
Suppose your entire project has a total approved budget (BAC) of $100,000. After a few weeks, you calculate that the work you have genuinely completed is worth $25,000 of that budget — this is your Earned Value (EV). Percentage Complete = $25,000 / $100,000 × 100 = 25%. This tells you and your stakeholders that a quarter of the total budgeted work has been accomplished so far.
Every PMP formula explained free — plus worked examples and practice in PMP Math, and full timed mocks in the simulator.