To find the unit price, divide the total price by the number of units in the group.
Unit prices serve many purposes, but one of the most practical is to help you save money at the store. If you can calculate the unit price of different brands or sizes of items, you can determine which one is the best deal.

Let's practice a few examples of unit price:

Example 1

Cereal is on sale this week: 2 boxes for $5.00. What is the unit price?

The unit price means the price for just one box of cereal.

To find the unit price, we must divide the total price ($5.00) by the number of units (2 boxes).

$5.00 ÷ 2 = $2.50

Unit Price is $2.50 per box.

As always, we should ask ourselves if this is a reasonable answer.

Yes, $2.50 makes sense. (If we had made a mistake with our decimal and gotten an answer of $25.00, we would realize that it doesn't make sense for one box to be $25 if two boxes cost only $5.)

Example 2

Grady is buying a pack of socks for $8.68. The pack contains 4 pairs of socks. What is the unit price?

We are trying to find the price for one pair of socks

To find the unit price, we must divide the total price ($8.68) by the number of units (4 pairs).

$8.68 ÷ 4 = $2.17

Unit Price is $2.17 per pair

Example 3

Rylie is selling a dozen cookies for $8.00. What is the unit price? Round your answer to the nearest cents.

We need to find the cost of each cookie.

To find the unit price, we must divide the total price ($8.00) by the number of units (a dozen).

A dozen means 12, so we will divide by 12.

$8.00 ÷ 12 = $0.666

The 6 repeats, so we will need to round this answer to the nearest cents : $0.67

Unit Price is $0.67 or 67¢

Summary

The unit price is the cost for one unit of an article we want to buy.
To find the unit price, divide the total price by the number of units in the group.