You can use the following formula to calculate year over year (YoY) growth for some company:

YoY Growth = (Current Period Revenue / Previous Period Revenue) - 1

For example, suppose a company earns $8 million in revenue this year and earned $5 million in revenue last year.

We would calculate their year over year growth to be 60%:

Year over Year Growth = ($8 million / $5 million) - 1 = 0.60

The following example shows how to use this formula to calculate year over year growth for a company in Google Sheets.

Example: Calculate Year Over Year Growth in Google Sheets

Suppose we have the following dataset that shows the total revenue for some company during 10 consecutive years:

We can type the following formula into cell C3 to calculate the year over year growth between 2012 and 2013:

=(B3/B2)-1

Once we press Enter, the year over year growth will be displayed as a decimal:

We can see that the year over year growth from 2012 to 2013 is 5%, which was calculated as:

Year over Year Growth = ($315,000 / $300,000) - 1 = 0.05

We can then drag and fill this formula down to each remaining cell in column C to calculate the year over year growth each year:

The year over year growth values are now formatted as percentages.

Notice that whenever revenue is down in a given year, the year over year growth percentage is negative.

For example, consider the years 2019 and 2020.

Here is how the year over year growth was calculated for 2020:

Year over Year Growth = ($800,000 / $880,000) - 1 = -0.0909

The year over year growth is -9.09% since revenue decreased from the current year compared to the previous year.

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Google Sheets: