This page makes free printable percent word problems on demand: press the button and you get a new sheet of 20 problems with a matching answer key, ready for US Letter or A4 paper. You will see items like “Cleo answered 50% of 20 questions correctly. How many were correct?” and “A jacket costs 20 dollars with 10% off. How much is the discount?” on the printed page, with 10 and 2 dollars waiting on the answer key so nobody has to redo the arithmetic.
‘New set of problems’ opens the generator in its own tab. There you can change the problem count and turn the answer key on or off. ‘Print or save as PDF’ opens the print dialog — choose Save as PDF in the printer list to keep the file. The sheet fits US Letter and A4, and the answer key prints on its own page.
Key words help and mislead in roughly equal measure. 'Altogether' usually means add and sometimes does not, so the child still has to picture the situation.
The reliable routine is to read it twice, say what is being asked in your own words, write the number sentence, then calculate. Skipping straight to the numbers is what produces confident wrong answers.
These problems use benchmark percentages, so the reading, not the arithmetic, is the challenge.
Answers should carry their units. A number without a unit is not an answer to a word problem, however correct the arithmetic.
Work of this kind is commonly aligned with the problem-solving expectations for this grade; schools outside the US meet the same skill at roughly the same age, which is why these percent word problems travel well.
| # | Problem | Answer | What to check |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cleo answered 50% of 20 questions correctly. How many were correct? | 10 | Watch for: missing a step in a two-step problem |
| 2 | A jacket costs 20 dollars with 10% off. How much is the discount? | 2 dollars | Check: dropping the units |
| 3 | A jacket costs 130 dollars with 15% off. How much is the discount? | 19.5 dollars | Look at: being thrown by unfamiliar names or objects |
| 4 | Out of 130 students, 40% ride a bus. How many students ride a bus? | 52 | Ask about: not checking whether the answer is sensible |
| 5 | Cleo answered 15% of 80 questions correctly. How many were correct? | 12 | Watch for: grabbing the numbers and guessing the operation |
| 6 | Out of 100 students, 10% ride a bus. How many students ride a bus? | 10 | Check: answering a different question |
Try “A jacket costs 130 dollars with 15% off. How much is the discount?” together before letting the child start alone. The answer to “A jacket costs 130 dollars with 15% off. How much is the discount?” is 19.5 dollars, and talking through how it was reached takes about a minute and saves several minutes of guessing later in the sheet.
The item “A jacket costs 20 dollars with 10% off. How much is the discount?” is worth doing slowly. The answer to “A jacket costs 20 dollars with 10% off. How much is the discount?” is 2 dollars, and the route to it is the route every other problem on this sheet takes — which is why the sheet has 20 of them rather than one.
Answers appear next to their question numbers, so a wrong item like “A jacket costs 20 dollars with 10% off. How much is the discount?” can be found in the key in a second and re-worked while it is still fresh.
Keys are produced by the same code that produces the questions, so a mismatch between question and answer is not possible on these sheets.
Portrait orientation is what the sheet is designed for. Landscape works but wastes about a third of the paper, so leave the orientation alone unless you have a reason.
The sheet is laid out to fit one page on both US Letter and A4. Leave the browser scaling at 100% and turn headers and footers off, and the 20 problems land inside the margins on either paper size.
One sheet of percent word problems a day for two weeks will tell you more about where a child working at this level actually stands than any single long assessment.
→ Free Word Problems Worksheets
Free printable math worksheets from a working math academy director in Korea. Problems come from our own code, not from a published workbook. Every sheet prints on US Letter or A4 with its answer key. All worksheets · Worksheet generator · Korean site
Last updated: 2026-09-13