Fraction Calculator

Type 7/16 + 5/12 into most fraction calculators and you get 41/48 back, full stop. Which is fine, until the assignment is to show your work. Then a bare answer is close to useless, because the number is the easy part. What gets graded is the working, the line where you find the common denominator and the line where you reduce. A lone answer skips every bit of it. So this one prints the whole thing, every step the operation actually takes, laid out the way a teacher wants it on the page.

You also get the answer in all three forms at once, a plain fraction, a mixed number, and a decimal, sitting next to each other so you never have to convert anything in your head. 3/4 divided by 1/2 comes back as 3/2, as 1 1/2, and as 1.5, all three at the same time. It adds, subtracts, multiplies, and divides two fractions or mixed numbers, reduces to lowest terms on its own, and runs entirely in your browser, so nothing you type gets uploaded anywhere.

1. Enter Fraction A. Put the top number in Numerator and the bottom in Denominator. Leave the Whole box empty for an ordinary fraction like 3/4.
2. Pick the operation from the dropdown in the middle: add, subtract, multiply, or divide.
3. Enter Fraction B the same way.
4. Read the result. It comes back reduced, shown as a fraction, a mixed number, and a decimal, with a step box underneath that walks through exactly how it got there.

For a mixed number like 2 3/4, the 2 goes in the Whole box and 3/4 in the numerator and denominator. Negatives go anywhere they make sense, a minus on the whole number for -2 3/4, or on the numerator for -3/4, and both mean the same thing to the calculator. And if all you want is to simplify a single fraction rather than combine two, multiply it by 1/1 and read the reduced result.

With whole numbers, adding is the first easy thing you learn and long division is the scary one, but fractions flip that order completely. Multiplying and dividing them is quick, it's adding and subtracting where people stall out, and the whole difficulty sits in the denominators.

You can't add 1/2 and 1/3 as they sit, because the pieces are different sizes. A half and a third aren't the same unit, so counting them together means nothing. You have to re-cut both into equal pieces first, and that shared piece size is the common denominator. Multiply the two bottoms (2 times 3 makes 6), rewrite each fraction over 6 so 1/2 becomes 3/6 and 1/3 becomes 2/6, then add the tops and land on 5/6. That rewrite line, the moment both fractions suddenly share a bottom, is the one the step box shows you, and nine times out of ten it's the exact line the worksheet is grading.

Worth knowing if you do these by hand: multiplying the two denominators together always gets you a valid common denominator, though rarely the smallest one. For 1/6 + 1/4 the product is 24, while the least common denominator is 12, and using 12 keeps the numbers smaller. The calculator takes the straight product and reduces at the end, so you reach the same lowest-terms answer either way, just with slightly bigger numbers in the middle. I left it that way on purpose. The product method is the one that always works and never sends you hunting for a least common multiple first.

Multiplying and dividing skip all of that. Multiply is straight across, tops times tops and bottoms times bottoms, with no common denominator anywhere in sight. Divide is keep, change, flip: keep the first fraction, change the divide into a multiply, flip the second one over. The step box spells the flip out so it stops feeling like a rule you just have to trust.

A lot of the free fraction tools handle 1/2 + 1/4 fine and then come apart the second the input gets real. This one is built for the awkward stuff, because the awkward stuff is most of actual homework. Mixed numbers like 2 3/4 convert cleanly instead of throwing an error. Improper fractions, where the top outweighs the bottom, are no problem, and you get the tidy mixed-number version handed back right next to them.

Negatives are the part that breaks basic converters, and this one just handles them. Put the minus on the whole number or on the numerator, wherever it naturally lands, and it works. Two negatives cancel the way they should, so -3/-4 comes back as a clean positive 3/4. The sign always ends up on top, which is the standard convention, so -1/2, 1/-2, and negative one-half all resolve to the same value. That's also why -1/2 + 1/2 gives you a plain 0 rather than some -0 or an error, the two tops just cancel and there's nothing left over.

The one input it flatly refuses is a zero on the bottom. A fraction is a division, and dividing by zero has no answer, so instead of printing nonsense it stops and tells you plainly. Same story if you try to divide by a fraction that works out to zero, say 0/7, since flipping it would drop a zero underneath. A zero on top is completely fine though, 0/5 is just 0.