You can use the following basic syntax to group rows by year in a pandas DataFrame:

df.groupby(df.your_date_column.dt.year)['values_column'].sum()

This particular formula groups the rows by date in your_date_column and calculates the sum of values for the values_column in the DataFrame.

Note that the dt.year() function extracts the year from a date column in pandas.

The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.

Example: How to Group by Year in Pandas

Suppose we have the following pandas DataFrame that shows the sales made by some company on various dates:

import pandas as pd

#create DataFrame
df = pd.DataFrame({'date': pd.date_range(start='1/1/2020', freq='3m', periods=10),
                   'sales': [6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 8, 8, 15, 22, 9],
                   'returns': [0, 3, 2, 2, 1, 3, 2, 4, 1, 5]})

#view DataFrame
print(df)

        date  sales  returns
0 2020-01-31      6        0
1 2020-04-30      8        3
2 2020-07-31      9        2
3 2020-10-31     11        2
4 2021-01-31     13        1
5 2021-04-30      8        3
6 2021-07-31      8        2
7 2021-10-31     15        4
8 2022-01-31     22        1
9 2022-04-30      9        5

Related:

We can use the following syntax to calculate the sum of sales grouped by year:

#calculate sum of sales grouped by year
df.groupby(df.date.dt.year)['sales'].sum()

date
2020    34
2021    44
2022    31
Name: sales, dtype: int64

Here’s how to interpret the output:

• The total sales made during 2020 was 34.
• The total sales made during 2021 was 44.
• The total sales made during 2022 was 31.

We can use similar syntax to calculate the max of the sales values grouped by year:

#calculate max of sales grouped by year
df.groupby(df.date.dt.year)['sales'].max()

date
2020    11
2021    15
2022    22
Name: sales, dtype: int64

We can use similar syntax to calculate any value we’d like grouped by the year value of a date column.

Note: You can find the complete documentation for the GroupBy operation in pandas .

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common operations in pandas: