jQuery UI Sortable Position

You can use the ui object provided to the events, specifically you want the stop event, the ui.item property and .index(), like this:

$("#sortable").sortable({
    stop: function(event, ui) {
        alert("New position: " + ui.item.index());
    }
});

You can see a working demo here, remember the .index() value is zero-based, so you may want to +1 for display purposes.

I wasn't quite sure where I would store the start position, so I want to elaborate on David Boikes comment. I found that I could store that variable in the ui.item object itself and retrieve it in the stop function as so:

$( "#sortable" ).sortable({
    start: function(event, ui) {
        ui.item.startPos = ui.item.index();
    },
    stop: function(event, ui) {
        console.log("Start position: " + ui.item.startPos);
        console.log("New position: " + ui.item.index());
    }
});