How to Find the Sum of Rows in a Pandas DataFrame

Often you may be interested in calculating the sum of one or more rows in a pandas DataFrame. Fortunately you can do this easily in pandas using the sum(axis=1) function.

This tutorial shows several examples of how to use this function on the following DataFrame:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

#create DataFrame
df = pd.DataFrame({'rating': [90, 85, 82, 88, 94, 90, 76, 75, 87, 86],
                   'points': [25, 20, 14, 16, 27, 20, 12, 15, 14, 19],
                   'assists': [5, 7, 7, 8, 5, 7, 6, 9, 9, 5],
                   'rebounds': [8, np.nan, 10, 6, 6, 9, 6, 10, 10, 7]})

#view DataFrame 
df


        rating	points	assists	rebounds
0	90	25	5	8.0
1	85	20	7	NaN
2	82	14	7	10.0
3	88	16	8	6.0
4	94	27	5	6.0
5	90	20	7	9.0
6	76	12	6	6.0
7	75	15	9	10.0
8	87	14	9	10.0
9	86	19	5	7.07

Example 1: Find the Sum of Each Row

We can find the sum of each row in the DataFrame by using the following syntax:

df.sum(axis=1)

0    128.0
1    112.0
2    113.0
3    118.0
4    132.0
5    126.0
6    100.0
7    109.0
8    120.0
9    117.0
dtype: float64

The output tells us:

• The sum of values in the first row is 128.
• The sum of values in the second row is 112.
• The sum of values in the third row is 113.

And so on.

Example 2: Place the Row Sums in a New Column

We can use the following code to add a column to our DataFrame to hold the row sums:

#define new DataFrame column 'row_sum' as the sum of each row
df['row_sum'] = df.sum(axis=1)

#view DataFrame
df

rating	points	assists	rebounds	row_sum
0	90	25	5	8.0	128.0
1	85	20	7	NaN	112.0
2	82	14	7	10.0	113.0
3	88	16	8	6.0	118.0
4	94	27	5	6.0	132.0
5	90	20	7	9.0	126.0
6	76	12	6	6.0	100.0
7	75	15	9	10.0	109.0
8	87	14	9	10.0	120.0
9	86	19	5	7.0	117.0

Example 3: Find the Row Sums for a Short List of Specific Columns

We can use the following code to find the row sum for a short list of specific columns:

#define new DataFrame column as sum of points and assists columns
df['sum_pa'] = df['points'] + df['assists']

#view DataFrame
df

	rating	points	assists	rebounds  sum_pa
0	90	25	5	8.0	  30
1	85	20	7	NaN	  27
2	82	14	7	10.0	  21
3	88	16	8	6.0	  24
4	94	27	5	6.0	  32
5	90	20	7	9.0	  27
6	76	12	6	6.0	  18
7	75	15	9	10.0	  24
8	87	14	9	10.0	  23
9	86	19	5	7.0	  24

Example 4: Find the Row Sums for a Long List of Specific Columns

We can use the following code to find the row sum for a longer list of specific columns:

#define col_list as a list of all DataFrame column names
col_list= list(df)

#remove the column 'rating' from the list
col_list.remove('rating')

#define new DataFrame column as sum of rows in col_list 
df['new_sum'] = df[col_list].sum(axis=1)

#view DataFrame
df

        rating	points	assists	rebounds new_sum
0	90	25	5	8.0	 38.0
1	85	20	7	NaN	 27.0
2	82	14	7	10.0	 31.0
3	88	16	8	6.0	 30.0
4	94	27	5	6.0	 38.0
5	90	20	7	9.0	 36.0
6	76	12	6	6.0	 24.0
7	75	15	9	10.0	 34.0
8	87	14	9	10.0	 33.0
9	86	19	5	7.0	 31.0

You can find the complete documentation for the pandas sum() function here.