# What are decimal odds, and how do I read 2.50? *For anyone who has seen a price like 2.50 or 1.33 next to a team's name and wondered what the number is. A plain guide, with the real prices for Monday night's game at Newcastle as the worked example.* Features · Published 07:26 CET, 2 Nov 2026 · Match News (https://matchnews.news/features/what-are-decimal-odds/) By Features desk · Reviewed by Fredrik Jurek Decimal odds are a way of writing a price as a single number, such as 2.50. The number tells you how much you get back in total for each 1 you stake if the outcome happens, and that total includes your stake. So 2.50 means: stake 1, get 2.50 back, which is 1.50 of profit plus the 1 you put down. The same number also hides a second piece of information, the chance the market gives the outcome, which you find by dividing 1 by the price: 1 divided by 2.50 is 0.40, or 40%. That is the whole idea. Everything below is the detail a newcomer asks about next, and a worked example with real prices from this site's feed. ## What does 2.50 pay, in actual money? Multiply the stake by the price to get the total return, then take the stake away to see the profit. Stake 10 at 2.50: return 25, profit 15. Stake 20 at 2.50: return 50, profit 30. Stake 100 at 2.50: return 250, profit 150. The decimal always includes the stake, which is what makes it easy. If you see 1.50, you know the total return on a stake of 10 is 15, so the profit is 5. If you see 10.00, the return is 100 and the profit is 90. There is nothing to add on afterwards. ## How do I turn a decimal price into a chance? Divide 1 by the price, or 100 by the price if you prefer whole numbers. Both give the same answer. 2.00 becomes 50%. 2.50 becomes 40%. 1.50 becomes about 67%. 4.00 becomes 25%. 10.00 becomes 10%. 1.25 becomes 80%. The number you get is called the implied probability, the chance the price implies. It is not a fact about the match; it is the market's opinion, expressed as a number. A team at 1.25 is thought to win four times in five. That also means the market expects them to fail one time in five, which is not rare. ## A worked example: Newcastle v Everton on Monday night At 06:23 CET on Monday 2 November, BettingBeast's feed had these prices for the Premier League game at St James' Park at 21:00 CET: Newcastle to win 2.32, the draw 3.63, Everton to win 3.27. Read them one at a time. Newcastle at 2.32: a stake of 10 returns 23.20, so 13.20 profit, and the implied chance is 1 divided by 2.32, which is about 43%. The draw at 3.63: a stake of 10 returns 36.30, and the chance is about 28%. Everton at 3.27: a stake of 10 returns 32.70, and the chance is about 31%. So the market makes Newcastle the favourite, the outcome it thinks most likely, but not a strong one: 43% is less than half. Everton are the underdog, the less likely outcome, yet at 31% they are far from written off. The draw sits between the two. Those three numbers tell you more about how the market sees the game than any single price does. Prices change before kick-off, so the card on our match article carries the live one. ## Why do the three chances add up to more than 100? Add the three from the example: 43 plus 28 plus 31 makes 102. That extra 2% is the margin, the fee a bookmaker builds into the prices so that it keeps a small share whatever happens. If the prices were "fair", with no margin, the three chances would add up to exactly 100. The size of the margin varies from market to market and from day to day. A snapshot of a feed can occasionally add up to slightly less than a whole because the three prices were captured at slightly different moments; the live page is the one to trust. ## How do decimal odds compare with fractions and American odds? They are three ways of writing the same thing. British bookmakers traditionally used fractions, American ones use a plus-and-minus system, and most of Europe and most online sites use decimals, which are the easiest to calculate with. A fraction shows profit only, not the stake. 6/4 means a profit of 6 for every 4 staked, which is 1.50 for every 1, so 6/4 is 2.50 in decimals. Evens, or 1/1, is 2.00. To convert a fraction to a decimal, divide the top by the bottom and add 1. American odds use a base of 100. A plus number shows the profit on a stake of 100: +150 means a profit of 150 on 100, which is 2.50 in decimals. A minus number shows the stake needed to make a profit of 100: -200 means you stake 200 to win 100, which is 1.50 in decimals. If you only ever read decimals you will never need the other two, but it helps to know that 2.50, 6/4 and +150 are the same price. ## What does a price under 2.00 mean? A price of exactly 2.00 is the halfway line. It pays a profit equal to your stake and implies a 50% chance. Anything under 2.00 means the market thinks the outcome is more likely than not; the lower the number, the more likely. Anything over 2.00 means less likely than not. In old betting language a price under 2.00 is "odds-on" and a price over 2.00 is "odds-against". You will see both phrases in match reports; they mean nothing more than which side of 2.00 the price sits. ## Is a lower price better? Neither lower nor higher is better in itself. A lower price means more likely and smaller profit; a higher price means less likely and bigger profit. The two move together by design. What matters when you read a price is whether the chance it implies matches your own view of the game, and that is a judgement about football, not about numbers. This site reports prices and how they move; it does not tell anyone what to do with them. ## Why do decimal prices have three decimal places in some places and two in others? BettingBeast's feed, which this site reads every 30 minutes, gives prices to three decimal places, for example 2.316. In articles we round to two, so 2.32, because the third decimal makes almost no difference to the return and makes the text harder to read. The match card and the chart on each article draw from the feed directly. Where a price appears in our text it always carries the time it was captured, because a price without a time is a price that may no longer exist. ## In plain words A decimal price is one number that answers two questions. How much do I get back for each 1 staked if this happens? That is the number itself. How likely does the market think this is? That is 1 divided by the number. 2.50 pays 2.50 for 1 and implies a 40% chance. 2.00 is the halfway line. Under it is likely, over it is not, and the three chances in a match add up to a little more than 100 because the bookmaker keeps a margin. Once you can read 2.50, you can read any price on any match page. ## Sources 1. BettingBeast football prices, captured by this site's odds job (data/odds-latest.json) (BettingBeast via Match News) https://matchnews.news/data/odds-latest.json - Read 07:25 CET, 2 Nov 2026 2. Premier League standings and fixtures (licensed feed, generated 2026-11-02T05:23Z, in data/latest.json) (football-data.org via Match News) https://www.football-data.org/ - Read 06:40 CET, 2 Nov 2026 --- 18+. Gambling involves risk and can be addictive. Please gamble responsibly. Odds links go to BettingBeast. Match News is a football news site published by Checkraise Ltd. Every odds link on this site goes to BettingBeast. Articles are written with the help of an AI system and checked against the sources they cite; the responsible editor is named on every article.