Work out take-home pay without repeating the gross pay three times
LET names a value once so a formula reads as a sentence instead of three separate references to the same cell.
Task:
You run payroll for a five-person team at a small design studio. Every paycheck deducts a flat 20% of gross pay for income tax and a further 5% of the same gross pay for the pension scheme. In column C, work out each employee's net pay — using LET to name the gross pay once rather than writing the same cell reference three times over.
Learning Objectives:
- Bind a repeated cell reference to one name with LET
- Write a formula that reads as a sentence instead of three separate lookups of the same cell
- Recognize when a value used more than once is worth naming rather than retyping
Solve without hints for +5 XP
Interactive Spreadsheet
The data in this exercise
This is the grid you start with. Cell references in the task — B6, C2 — point at the row numbers and column letters below.
| A | B | C | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Employee | Gross Pay | Net Pay |
| 2 | Priya Shah | 4200 | |
| 3 | Tom Reyes | 3800 | |
| 4 | Lena Ortiz | 5100 | |
| 5 | Marcus Webb | 4600 | |
| 6 | Yuki Tanaka | 3950 |
What this exercise teaches (contains the answer)
LET(gross,B2,gross-gross*0.2-gross*0.05) binds the cell reference to one name and then does the arithmetic entirely in terms of that name, so the formula reads as a sentence — take gross pay, subtract a fifth for tax and a twentieth for pension — rather than three repetitions of B2 that only careful reading would catch as consistent. That matters because both deductions are percentages of the same figure: a formula that referenced B2 three times and got edited to B3 in only one of those spots would still return a plausible-looking number, and nothing about the sheet would say it was wrong. Naming the value once means there is exactly one place gross pay is read from, so that kind of mismatch can't happen rather than merely being unlikely.