In this paper, we propose tree edit distance with variables, which is an extension of the tree edit distance to handle trees with variables and has a potential application to measuring the similarity between mathematical formulas. We analyze the computational complexity of several variants of this model. In particular, we show that the problem is NP-complete for ordered trees. We also show for unordered trees that the problem of deciding whether or not the distance is 0 is graph isomorphism complete but can be solved in polynomial time if the maximum outdegree of input trees is bounded by a constant. We also present parameterized and exponential-time algorithms for ordered and unordered cases, respectively.