You can use the following formula to combine the SUBTOTAL and AVERAGE functions in Excel:
=SUBTOTAL(1, C2:C11)
This particular formula allows you to calculate the average value of only the visible cells in the range C2:C11.
The 1 in the first argument specifies that the AVERAGE should be used for aggregation in the SUBTOTAL function.
The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.
Example: How to Use SUBTOTAL with AVERAGE in Excel
Suppose we have the following dataset that contains information about various basketball players:
Next, let’s filter the data to only show the rows where the players are in the West conference.
To do so, highlight the cell range A1:C11. Then click the Data tab along the top ribbon and click the Filter button.
Then click the dropdown arrow next to Conference and make sure that only the box next to West is checked, then click OK:
The data will automatically be filtered to only show the rows where the Conference column is equal to West:
If we attempt to use the AVERAGE() function to calculate the average of the values in the Points column, it will actually return the average of values in the Points column for all of the rows in the original dataset:
Instead, we need to use the following formula:
=SUBTOTAL(1, C2:C11)
The following screenshot shows how to use this formula in practice:
This formula returns the correct average of 21.16667.
We can confirm this is correct by manually calculating the average of the points values for only the visible rows
Average of Points for visible rows: (12 + 28 + 30 + 15 + 15 + 27) / 6 = 21.16667.
Note #1: You can also use =SUBTOTAL(101, C2:C11) to calculate the average and also exclude manually hidden rows.
Note #2: You can find the complete documentation for the SUBTOTAL function in Excel here.
Additional Resources
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common operations in Excel:
How to Delete Filtered Rows in Excel
How to Count Filtered Rows in Excel
How to Sum Filtered Rows in Excel
