Subtraction assignment (-=)

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The subtraction assignment (-=) operator performs subtraction on the two operands and assigns the result to the left operand.

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Syntax

js
x -= y

Description

x -= y is equivalent to x = x - y, except that the expression x is only evaluated once.

Examples

Subtraction assignment using numbers

js
let bar = 5;

bar -= 2; // 3

Other non-BigInt values are coerced to numbers:

js
bar -= "foo"; // NaN

Subtraction assignment using BigInts

js
let foo = 3n;
foo -= 2n; // 1n
foo -= 1; // TypeError: Cannot mix BigInt and other types, use explicit conversions

Specifications

Specification
ECMAScript Language Specification
# sec-assignment-operators

Browser compatibility

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See also