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When rounding a percentage, is it preferable to use "to the nearest percent" or "to the nearest percentage point"? Does this change if we want to round to the nearest, say, 10 percent/percentage points? I've seen both used, and the meaning is generally clear either way, but is there any benefit to using one over the other?

My initial thought is that percentage point should be reserved specifically for referring to a difference in percents, so "Rounded to the nearest percentage point, 5.1% exceeds 3.5% by 2 percentage points.", but "Rounded to the nearest percent, 5.1% is 5%."

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    it does not matter at all. note that in math you generally do not round, except for visualization purposes maybe. also i want to stress one thing: rounding low percentages implies big relative errors. i personally would not round 1.4% to 1% :-) – 2017-01-06
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    I suppose I should clarify that the reason for the question is for use in formal educational writing, e.g. a text book that might include the concepts of percent/percentage point, and also rounding. Maybe the question would be better suited for the math ed stack exchange? – 2017-01-06
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    in education there are indeed different conventions than in math; actually there are sometimes conventions that differ, sometimes there are conventions that do not exist in math. (the convention to underline results for instance does not exist, the convention to use $\times$ as normal multiplication instead of cross product differs in education and i do not even start to talk about symbols like $\Rightarrow$ and so on) thank you for the hint that there is an educational math stack exchange :-) dindnt know that. – 2017-01-06

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