The best apps to practice mental math, from tips to speed

Mental math is arithmetic you do in your head, without a calculator. Search the App Store or Google Play for mental math apps and you’ll find dozens of apps to help you practice, most of which work the same way. What sets them apart is the kind of problems they give you. If you want practice with everyday math, like figuring out a tip, a discount, or your share of a bill, Elevate is a good place to start.

Quick answer: What are the best apps to practice mental math?

• Elevate is the best app for everyday mental math. Its 12 math games practice tips, discounts, percentages, and splitting a bill. The games even get more difficult as you improve.

• Elevate is free to download. Elevate Premium, the paid plan, is $39.99 a year with a seven-day free trial, or $9.99 a month with no trial. Prices are as of November 2026 and vary by country.

• Elevate suits adults who want to calculate math more quickly at the store, at a restaurant, and in their budget. Its other games train memory, reading, and writing, too.

• Tomo offers a short course on everyday math, Lumosity mixes math games into its brain games, and Mathemagics teaches mental math tricks. Numbio, Mental Math Cards, Mental Math on Android, Zetamac, Mental Math Pro, and Math Trainer offer arithmetic drills.

What mental math games are in the Elevate brain training app?

Elevate has 12 math games among its 40+ games, and the rest train memory, reading, writing, and speaking. The math games are built around the math you do in a normal week, and each one sticks to one kind of problem. So if tips are the thing that slows you down, there’s a game just for tips.

• Leaving a tip: The Tipping game helps you work out common tip percentages quickly. For a 20% tip on $35, you find 10% ($3.50) and double it, so the tip is $7.

• A sale price or a markup: Percentages teaches you to figure out markups and discounts in your head. A $60 jacket at 25% off costs three-quarters of $60, which is $45.

• Comparing prices at the store: Discounting asks you to put prices in order from cheapest to most expensive, with taxes and discounts included. It’s the same thinking you do when two brands are on sale at different prices and you want the better deal.

• Splitting a bill: Division helps you divide numbers more accurately, so splitting a dinner bill or household costs goes faster. A $96 dinner for four people comes to $24 each.

• Checking a total: Estimation makes your quick guesses more accurate. Three items at $3.95 come to about $12, so if the receipt says $15.85, it’s worth a second look.

• Cooking or traveling: Conversion helps you switch between units of weight and distance, and Measuring puts mental math to work in the kitchen and on building projects.

And there's more: Averages teaches you to quickly find the average of a set of numbers, and Purchasing helps with the math behind everyday spending. Equivalence shows you ways to break down hard fractions, while Subtraction is simple practice for taking one number away from another in your head.

You don’t have to plan your practice, either. Elevate puts together a short workout of a few games for you each day. The games adjust to your scores, so the problems stay hard enough to stretch you without getting so hard that you want to give up.

There’s research behind Elevate, too. In a four-week study from 2015, 146 people who played Elevate improved more than a comparison group of 125 people on tests of grammar, writing, listening, and math.

What does a first week with Elevate’s math games look like?

• Day 1: Download Elevate, make a free account, and play your first workout of three games.

• Days 2 to 4: Come back once a day. A workout a day is the whole habit.

• Days 5 to 7: If you’d like to play Tipping or Percentages whenever you want, and not only when they show up in your workout, try the seven-day free trial of the yearly Premium plan.

• At the end of the week: At your next meal out, work out the tip yourself before you look at the suggested amounts on the receipt. That’s the easiest way to see what a week of practice changed.

If a tip or a sale sign is where your math tends to stall, download Elevate and try today’s free workout.

Which apps practice mental math for tips, discounts, and percentages?

Of the apps on this list, Elevate is the one built most around everyday math, but a few others cover some of the same ground.

• Tomo has a free course called Everyday Mental Math on iPhone and Android. It runs 12 levels of about five minutes each and covers tips, discounts, splitting a bill, and estimating. One lesson, for example, shows that a 15% tip is 10% plus half of that 10%.

• Lumosity has a set of math games. In one of them, Raindrops, you solve arithmetic problems quickly, “like when calculating a tip.” One month of Lumosity Premium costs $14.99 on the App Store.

• Numbio includes percentage drills in its paid Pro plan, and Mental Math Pro offers percentage drills for free in a web browser.

Tomo’s course ends at level 12, while Elevate’s math games keep going with a new workout every day. To see how Elevate compares with other apps on memory, reading, and writing, read our guide to the best brain training apps.

Which apps improve your mental math speed?

You get faster at mental math by practicing the kind of sums you want to do faster. In a six-day study, adults who practiced mental addition got clearly better at it, even though the two-digit sums changed every day. That means the best app for speed is the one whose problems look like the ones you run into.

Which mental math apps teach tricks?

A mental math trick is a shortcut for one kind of problem, like finding 20% by doubling 10%. If you’d rather learn a trick before you race the clock, Mathemagics is the app built around tricks, while Mental Math Cards shows you how to break hard problems into easier ones. Numbio mixes trick lessons in with its drills, and Mental Math Pro’s paid plan adds a course of 14 strategies, such as adding two-digit numbers. If you want to pick up a few methods before you choose an app, our 10 mental math tricks are a good place to start.

How do you get faster at mental math with an app?

• Pick the problem you avoid. If you reach for your phone every time you split a bill, practice division first, since that’s the math you’ll actually use this week.

• Start at a level where you get most answers right. When a level is too hard, practice turns into guessing.

• Keep sessions short and daily. A few minutes on most days fits into a normal schedule more easily than one long session.

• Estimate before you calculate. Round the numbers and guess the answer first, then work it out exactly. If the two are far apart, you’ll know to check your work.

• Use what you practice right away. Work out your change before the cashier hands it over, or figure out a sale price before you get to the register.

Curious where you stand today? Our free Mental Math Practice tool gives you a 60-second round right in your browser, with no app to download. Try the tool once before you start, then again after a few weeks of practice to see how much faster you’ve gotten.

Is there a free mental math app?

Yes, and Elevate is the one we’d start with. Its free version gives you a workout of three games every day, plus a game of the week, and either one can include math games. If you never want to pay, Tomo’s Everyday Mental Math course, Zetamac, and Mental Math on Android cost nothing at all. Lumosity lets you play three games a day for free, and Numbio and Mental Math Pro both have free drills and a paid plan.