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:
To format the growth values as percentages, simply highlight the cell range C3:C11, then click the Number Format dropdown menu from the Home tab and choose Percentage:
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.
Additional Resources
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Excel:
How to Find Percentage of Two Numbers in Excel
How to Calculate a Weighted Percentage in Excel
How to Calculate a Cumulative Percentage in Excel
