How to Extract Year from Date in R (With Examples)

There are two ways to quickly extract the year from a date in R:

Method 1: Use format()

df$year as.Date(df$date, format="%d/%m/%Y"),"%Y")

Method 2: Use the lubridate package

library(lubridate)

df$year mdy(df$date))

This tutorial shows an example of how to use each of these methods in practice.

Method 1: Extract Year from Date Using format()

The following code shows how to extract the year from a date using the format() function combined with the “%Y” argument:

#create data frame
df #view data frame
df

        date sales
1 01/01/2021    34
2 01/04/2021    36
3 01/09/2021    44

#create new variable that contains year
df$year as.Date(df$date, format="%d/%m/%Y"),"%Y")

#view new data frame
df

        date sales year
1 01/01/2021    34 2021
2 01/04/2021    36 2021
3 01/09/2021    44 2021

Note that this format() function works with a variety of date formats. You simply must specify the format:

#create data frame
df #view data frame
df

        date sales
1 2021-01-01    34
2 2021-01-04    36
3 2021-01-09    44

#create new variable that contains year
df$year as.Date(df$date, format="%Y-%m-%d"),"%Y")

#view new data frame
df

        date sales year
1 01/01/2021    34 2021
2 01/04/2021    36 2021
3 01/09/2021    44 2021

Method 2: Extract Year from Date Using Lubridate

We can also use functions from the lubridate package to quickly extract the year from a date:

library(lubridate)

#create data frame
df #view data frame
df

        date sales
1 01/01/2021    34
2 01/04/2021    36
3 01/09/2021    44

#create new variable that contains year
df$year mdy(df$date))

#view new data frame
df

        date sales year
1 01/01/2021    34 2021
2 01/04/2021    36 2021
3 01/09/2021    44 2021

Lubridate also works with a variety of date formats. You simply must specify the format:

#create data frame
df #view data frame
df

        date sales
1 2021-01-01    34
2 2021-01-04    36
3 2021-01-09    44

#create new variable that contains year
df$year ymd(df$date))

#view new data frame
df

        date sales year
1 01/01/2021    34 2021
2 01/04/2021    36 2021
3 01/09/2021    44 2021

Additional Resources

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

How to Loop Through Column Names in R
How to Remove Outliers from Multiple Columns in R