Which Operators Come First? PHP Operator precedence just looks at which operation will be performed first. You’ve seen operator precedence in mathematics. The multiplication and division operators are executed before the addition and subtraction operators. With all of the different operators that we have in PHP, the interpreter needs to know which operation to perform in what order. Let’s look at a basic example in math to get started: 2 + 3 * 5 If you were not aware of operator precedence in mathematics, you may start working from left to right. The answer that you would get would be