float

Quantities, hours, percentages stored as numbers, weights, coefficients: any field declared as fields.Float renders through this widget unless the view says otherwise. It formats the stored value with your language's thousand separators and decimal point, applies a digit precision, and parses whatever the user types back into a float.

Because it is the default, you rarely write widget="float" yourself; the 7 explicit usages in core are views that need one of its options. What you configure instead are the options, and two of them do more than the labels suggest: the input accepts full math expressions, and the precision system has two competing sources with a defined winner.

Since 19.0 the widget also accepts monetary fields, giving you a currency-less rendering of an amount when the currency symbol would be noise.

Number formatting sounds cosmetic until an operations report shows 12,5 to a US manager and 12.5 to a German one, or until a purchasing team rounds a unit cost that the database stores to five decimals. The float widget is where Odoo decides what people see, which is not always what is stored: display precision comes from the widget's digits configuration, storage precision from the field definition. Most "Odoo rounds my numbers wrong" complaints are a mismatch between those two layers, not a calculation bug.

The 19.0 math input is a real productivity feature for data entry teams: typing =1250/4 into a quantity, or +=50 onto an existing stock count, beats reaching for a calculator. It is also worth telling your users it exists, because nobody discovers *= on their own.

When a number needs to read at a glance rather than exactly, human_readable turns 500,000,000 into 500M, which is usually the right call on dashboards and the wrong one on anything an accountant reconciles.

Odoo Studio (Enterprise) covers the standard case without code.

1. Open the form or list you want to change and click Studio.

2. From the Add tab, drag a Decimal field onto the view. The float widget is its default rendering; there is nothing to select.

3. In Properties, set the label and standard properties. Studio notes that decimals display with two digits by default while the database stores more.

4. If the number is really a percentage, a progress value or a time, switch the Widget dropdown to Percentage, Progress Bar or Time instead.

Studio stops at placing the field. The widget's formatting controls, digits, min_display_digits, hide_trailing_zeros, human_readable with decimals, and step, are all XML-level options with no Studio toggle. Changing display precision per view, or making a form input step by 0.25, is a one-line view change for a developer and not available otherwise. Decimal storage precision is a different layer again: it belongs to the field definition and decimal precision settings, not to this widget.

Display precision

<field name="efficiency_ratio" digits="[16, 3]"/>

Three decimals on screen regardless of what the field stores. The same value can be passed as options="{'digits': [16, 3]}"; if both are present the attribute wins.

Clean numbers without zero padding

<field name="weight"
       options="{'hide_trailing_zeros': True, 'min_display_digits': 2}"/>

1.20 renders as 1.2, while min_display_digits keeps at least two digits of significance. Note the snake_case name; the declared minDigits does nothing.

Dashboard-friendly large numbers

<field name="total_volume"
       options="{'human_readable': True, 'decimals': 1}"/>

500,000,000 becomes 500.0M while the field keeps focus-in editing of the exact value. decimals only applies together with human_readable.

Native number input with stepping

<field name="hours"
       options="{'type': 'number', 'step': 0.25}"/>

Renders an HTML number input whose spinner moves in quarter steps. In this mode locale formatting is bypassed while editing, and the math-expression parsing below does not apply.

Since 19.0 the default text input does not just parse numbers, it parses arithmetic. Two distinct mechanisms are in the source.

Expressions with a leading equals sign. Typing =8*4+2 evaluates the expression and stores 34. The parser converts ^ to exponentiation and evaluates through Odoo's safe expression evaluator, not JavaScript's eval.

Relative operations, new in 19.0. Typing an operator followed by equals and a number, +=10, -=5, *=2 or /=4, applies that operation to the current value of the field. The pattern is strict: operator first, then =, then one number. This is the mechanism enabled by the allowOperation flag the float widget passes to its parser, and it is easy to demonstrate on any quantity field in 19.

Both are display-layer features of the standard text mode. Set type: 'number' and you trade them for the browser's native input. One removal to know about: 18.0 forwarded the placeholder attribute to the input, and 19.0 dropped that prop from the widget entirely, so a placeholder on a plain float field no longer renders.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. The notes below read the public development branch, which is unstable until release; we re-verify against the shipped version.

For the float widget the development branch shows no functional change: the option list, extractProps, supported types and registration are all identical to 19.0, and the minDigits versus min_display_digits mismatch is still there. What does change is the component's internals, rewritten onto the new Owl signals and props system (useProps, proxy, signal.ref), so JavaScript patches against FloatField will need review even though views carry over untouched.