Yards Per Attempt Calculator (Y/A, AY/A, NY/A, ANY/A)

Background.

Yards per attempt is the simplest useful passing statistic there is: total passing yards divided by pass attempts. It is also incomplete in a specific and well-understood way, and this calculator returns the three refinements that close the gap, so you can see exactly how much of a quarterback's apparent efficiency survives contact with reality.

The hole in raw Y/A is the sack. A sack is not a pass attempt, and in an NFL box score the yardage lost on a sack is not charged against the quarterback's passing yards — it is charged to the team. That means a quarterback who is sacked forty times for 260 yards and one who is sacked eight times for 45 yards can post identical yards-per-attempt figures on identical passing lines, even though one of them cost his offence more than 200 extra yards of field position. Net yards per attempt fixes it directly by subtracting sack yardage from the numerator and adding sacks to the denominator, producing a rate per dropback rather than per attempt. It is not a fringe statistic: the NFL prints it itself as the 'Gain' column of the Top 10 Passers table in its own Record & Fact Book.

The second refinement handles outcomes rather than yardage. Adjusted yards per attempt credits each touchdown pass with a bonus of 20 yards and charges each interception 45 yards, on the reasoning that a red-zone touchdown throw and a five-yard checkdown are not equally valuable even when they gain similar yardage, and that a turnover costs the offence far more than the yards on the play. The 20-and-45 weights come from the Pro-Football-Reference glossary, which credits the idea to Carroll, Palmer and Thorn's 1988 book The Hidden Game of Football and notes explicitly that the modern version uses 20 yards per touchdown rather than the original 10. This calculator implements the modern 20-yard variant; if you are reproducing a figure from a pre-2000s source that used 10, expect a small difference.

Combine both refinements and you get adjusted net yards per attempt, ANY/A — touchdowns and interceptions weighted, sacks in the numerator and the denominator. It is the most complete passing rate computable from a public box score, and it correlates with team scoring better than passer rating does, largely because it sees the sacks that passer rating is structurally blind to.

The calculator returns all four rates side by side plus two supporting numbers: dropbacks, which is attempts plus sacks and is the denominator both net rates use, and sack rate, which is the single number that summarises the whole gross-versus-net gap. Reading them together is the point. If Y/A and NY/A are close, the passer was well protected or got rid of the ball quickly; if they diverge by more than about a yard, the sacks are doing real damage that no attempt-based statistic will show you. Below the widget you will find each definition attributed to the source that publishes it, a worked example checked against two figures the NFL prints itself, and an honest account of what even ANY/A cannot see — scrambles, rushing production, drops, throwaways and the game situation each pass was thrown in.

What is yards per attempt calculator?

Yards per attempt (Y/A) is passing yards divided by pass attempts, an official NFL statistic reported as a conference leaderboard each season. Three derived rates extend it. Net yards per attempt (NY/A) subtracts sack yardage from the yards and adds sacks to the attempts, giving yards per dropback; the NFL publishes this in its own Record & Fact Book. Adjusted yards per attempt (AY/A) leaves sacks alone but weights outcomes, adding 20 yards for each touchdown pass and subtracting 45 for each interception. Adjusted net yards per attempt (ANY/A) applies both adjustments together and is the most complete box-score passing efficiency rate in common use. The two weighted constants are conventions rather than laws of nature: they are the values Pro-Football-Reference publishes and uses, traceable to The Hidden Game of Football, and the modern 20-yard touchdown weight replaced an original 10-yard weight. Because every one of these rates divides by attempts or dropbacks, all four are volume-independent — they say how efficient a passer was per throw, not how much he produced. A quarterback with a brilliant ANY/A on 200 attempts and one with a mediocre ANY/A on 650 have contributed very differently to their teams, and no rate statistic will tell you which.

How to use this calculator.

1. 01Enter the passing line first: attempts, gross passing yards, touchdown passes and interceptions. Use the yardage exactly as the box score prints it — NFL individual passing yards already exclude sack losses.
2. 02Enter the sack pair. Box scores usually print it as 'Sacked/Yards Lost', for example 35/230, meaning 35 sacks costing 230 yards. Enter 35 in times sacked and 230 in sack yards lost.
3. 03If you only have a bare passing line with no sack data, leave both sack fields at 0. The net metrics will then be identical to the gross ones, which is a truthful result rather than a wrong one — just remember that it is not the passer's real net rate.
4. 04Compare Y/A against NY/A. The gap is exactly the cost of the sacks. A gap under half a yard is negligible; a gap over a yard means protection or holding the ball is materially reducing the offence's output.
5. 05Compare Y/A against AY/A. If AY/A is higher, the touchdown-to-interception profile is a net positive relative to a league-average passer; if it is lower, turnovers are eating the yardage.
6. 06Use ANY/A as the single summary number when comparing two quarterbacks, and quote dropbacks alongside it so the reader knows how much volume the rate is built on.

The formula.

All four rates share the same shape — an adjusted yardage figure over an adjusted attempt figure — and differ only in which adjustments are switched on.

Y/A is the base case: gross passing yards over pass attempts, no adjustment at all. It is an official NFL statistic and appears on the league's own leaderboards.

NY/A adjusts the denominator as well as the numerator. Sack yardage comes out of the yards and sacks go into the attempts, so the rate becomes yards per dropback. Both moves are necessary: subtracting sack yards while leaving the denominator alone would understate the damage, because a sack also burns a down. The Record & Fact Book's Top 10 Passers table prints this figure, which is easy to verify — Joe Burrow's 2024 line of 4,918 yards on 652 attempts with 48 sacks for 278 yards gives (4918 − 278) ÷ (652 + 48) = 6.6286, and the Fact Book prints 6.63.

AY/A adjusts the numerator only, adding 20 yards per touchdown pass and subtracting 45 per interception. The asymmetry is deliberate and is the interesting part of the statistic: an interception is treated as more than twice as costly as a touchdown is valuable. The reasoning is that an interception does not merely fail to score — it hands the opposition the ball, often with field position, so its cost includes the expected points the other team gains. Both constants are conventions published by Pro-Football-Reference, and the touchdown weight has changed once already, from 10 to 20, so treat them as a well-tested convention rather than a physical constant.

ANY/A applies both. The formula is (passing yards + 20 × touchdowns − 45 × interceptions − sack yards) ÷ (attempts + sacks). It is the closest thing to a single-number passing efficiency statistic available from a public box score.

Two supporting outputs make the rates easier to read. Dropbacks is attempts plus sacks — the denominator both net rates share, and the honest measure of how many times a passer was asked to throw. Sack rate is sacks divided by dropbacks; it condenses the entire gross-to-net gap into one percentage and is the number to quote when arguing about whether a sack problem belongs to the quarterback or the offensive line.

What none of these see: scrambles and designed quarterback runs (rushing statistics, not passing), dropped passes, throwaways, defensive pass interference yardage (which is credited to the team, not the passing line), and every aspect of game situation. A quarterback padding an ANY/A in garbage time and one earning it on third down in the fourth quarter look identical here.

A worked example.

Frequently asked questions.

References& sources.

1. [1]National Football League (2025). 2025 NFL Record & Fact Book — 2024 NFL Top 10 Passers table and the conference 'Yards Per Attempt' leaders. Source of the Lamar Jackson 2024 line used in the worked example (474 attempts, 4,172 yards, 41 TD, 4 INT, sacked 23 times for 149 yards, 8.8 Y/A, 8.09 in the net 'Gain' column) and of the Joe Burrow line used to confirm that the Gain column is net yards per attempt.
2. [2]Sports Reference LLC. Pro-Football-Reference glossary — verbatim definitions of AY/A ('(pass yards + 20*(pass TD) - 45*(interceptions thrown))/(passing attempts)'), NY/A ('(pass yards - sack yards)/(passing attempts + sacks)') and ANY/A, together with the note that the current AY/A uses 20 yards per touchdown instead of the original 10. Archived snapshot cited because the live page returns HTTP 403 to non-browser clients.
3. [3]Carroll, B., Palmer, P. & Thorn, J. (1988). The Hidden Game of Football. Warner Books, New York. The monograph Pro-Football-Reference credits with introducing adjusted yards per attempt and the reasoning behind weighting touchdowns and interceptions rather than counting raw yardage. Print source; no URL.
4. [4]National Football League (2025). Official Playing Rules of the National Football League, Rule 11 Section 1 Article 2 — touchdown 6 points, field goal 3, safety 2, try 1 or 2. The scoring values that make a touchdown pass worth a yardage bonus at all.