The C programming language contains the standard set of mathematical operators, add (+), subtract (-), multiply (*), divide (/), and the modulus operator (%). It is important to note that integer division truncates any fractional portion of the answer. Also the % operator cannot be applied to float or double.

+ and - operators maintain the same precedence, which is lower than the precedence of *, /, and %.

In addition C provides other operators such as the increment and decrement, ++ and -- respectively. These are unary operators; that is, operators that take only one argument. The ++ and -- operators can be applied either as a prefix operator (e.g. ++x) or postfix (e.g. x++), though there are subtle differences between the prefix and postfix operator when it comes to the return value: ++x will store x+1 and return x+1 while x++ will store x+1 but return x.

There are tables that summarize the precedence and associativity for all operators, but as a general rule you should explicitly declare the order of operations using parentheses; this can greatly enhance the clarity of the code, and diminish the chance that future changes will result in mistakes, even if the current arithmetic expression is correct.

C also provides the basic logical operators && (and), || (or), ! (not), which can be utilized for comparison and evaluation in conditional statements. Bitwise analogs of these operators exist as well (&, |, and ~ respectively). In addition, many other bitwise operators and variants of these operators with assignment exist (e.g. a += b will sum a and b, then store the result in a), though they are less frequently used or provide only marginal syntactic simplicity.