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Year over year growth (YOY) in Excel can be calculated by taking the current year’s data and dividing it by the data of the same period from the previous year. The resulting figure is then subtracted from 1 and multiplied by 100 to calculate the YOY growth rate as a percentage. This is done by using a formula such as =(A2/A1-1) *100, where A2 is the current year’s data and A1 is the data from the previous year.
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 Excel.
Example: Calculate Year Over Year Growth in Excel
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 will automatically be 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.