Money Maths Worksheets

Three kinds of question

Adding coins totals a set. Making change asks what comes back from a payment. Word problems wrap the same arithmetic inside a short scenario that has to be read before it can be answered. Mixed rotates all three.

Currency can be sterling, or dollars, or euros. Amounts run to £20 by default, twelve questions, answer key optional.

Change is subtraction that nobody does by subtracting

Ask an adult for change from £20 on a bill of £13.40. Almost nobody sets out a column subtraction.

They count up: 60p gets to £14, six pounds gets to £20, so £6.60. That is the method to teach. It is faster, it is harder to get wrong, and it is precisely what shopkeepers did for a couple of centuries before any till was calculating it for them — while column subtraction across a decimal point with a borrow in it is exactly where children lose marks, and counting up sidesteps the whole business.

The decimal point is the real difficulty

Money is the first place most children meet decimals. They meet them in a slightly odd form, too.

£1.50 is not one and a half of anything obvious. It is one pound and fifty pence — two units sharing one notation. Writing £1.5, or £1.05, for one pound fifty is the standard error, and it comes of treating the digits after the point as an ordinary number instead of a fixed two-digit field.

Insist on two decimal places for every money answer. Always. It is a small rule that prevents a large class of mistakes.

The scenario questions earn their place

Slower to mark. They also test something the other two modes cannot: deciding which operation the question actually wants.

A child who adds coins fluently may still have no idea whether a given question wants addition or subtraction, and that gap is completely invisible on a page of bare sums, which is why it survives so long undetected and then surfaces in a test. It is also the half that transfers to real life, where nobody hands you a labelled calculation.

Setting the ceiling

Keep amounts under £5 for infants, where the arithmetic should not cross a pound at all. Twenty is the default and suits juniors: big enough for realistic shopping, small enough that the numbers stay manageable.

Go higher for older pupils, particularly on the scenario questions, where a realistic total is a good deal more persuasive than a shopping trip that comes to four pounds.

Realism helps

Use prices from a real shop where you can. Let children check the answers with real coins.

Related: money counting for the coin-recognition stage that comes first, and word problems for the general skill.