The R programming language comes with a number of helpful functions to work with the data stored in data structures like vectors, lists, dataframes, etc. In this tutorial, we will look at one such function that helps us get the minimum value in a column of an R dataframe.
How to get the min value in an R dataframe column?

You can use the built-in min()
function in R to compute the minimum value in a dataframe column. Pass the column values as an argument to the function.
The following is the syntax –
min(dataframe[[column_name]])
Pass na.rm=TRUE
to avoid the NA
values when computing the minimum.
It returns the minimum value in the passed column.
Steps to calculate the minimum value in an R column
Let’s now look at a step-by-step example of using the above syntax to compute the min value of a numeric column in R.
Step 1 – Create a dataframe
First, we will create an R dataframe that we will be using throughout this tutorial.
# create a dataframe employees_df = data.frame( "Name"= c("Jim", "Dwight", "Angela", "Tobi", "Kevin"), "Age"= c(26, 28, 29, 32, 30), "Department"= c("Sales", "Sales", "Accounting", "HR", "Accounting"), "Salary" = c(80000, 81000, 72000, 65000, 72000) ) # display the dataframe print(employees_df)
Output:
Name Age Department Salary 1 Jim 26 Sales 80000 2 Dwight 28 Sales 81000 3 Angela 29 Accounting 72000 4 Tobi 32 HR 65000 5 Kevin 30 Accounting 72000
We now have a dataframe containing information about some employees in an office. The dataframe has the columns – “Name”, “Age”, “Department”, and “Salary”.
Step 2 – Calculate the minimum in a column using the min()
function
To calculate the minimum value in a column, pass the column values as an argument to the min()
function. You can use the [[]]
notation to access the values of a column.
Let’s compute the minimum salary from the above data. That is, we want to know the min value in the “Salary” column.
# min value in "Salary" column min_salary = min(employees_df[["Salary"]]) # display the min salary print(min_salary)
Output:
[1] 65000
The minimum value in the “Salary” column is 65000.
Minimum value of a column with NA
values in R
What if there are NA
values in a column?
Let’s find out.
# create a dataframe employees_df = data.frame( "Name"= c("Jim", "Dwight", "Angela", "Tobi", "Kevin"), "Age"= c(26, 28, 29, 32, 30), "Department"= c("Sales", "Sales", "Accounting", "HR", "Accounting"), "Salary" = c(80000, 81000, 72000, NA, 72000) ) # display the dataframe print(employees_df)
Output:
Name Age Department Salary 1 Jim 26 Sales 80000 2 Dwight 28 Sales 81000 3 Angela 29 Accounting 72000 4 Tobi 32 HR NA 5 Kevin 30 Accounting 72000
Here, we created a new dataframe such that the “Salary” column contains some NA
values.
Now, let’s apply the min()
function to get the minimum value in the “Salary” column.
# min value in "Salary" column min_salary = min(employees_df[["Salary"]]) # display the min salary print(min_salary)
Output:
[1] NA
We get NA
as the min value. This happened because the “Salary” column here contains NA
values and performing any mathematical operation with NA
results in an NA
in R.
If you want to compute the min value in a column with NA
values, pass na.rm=TRUE
to the min()
function which essentially skips these values when computing the minimum.
# min value in "Salary" column min_salary = min(employees_df[["Salary"]], na.rm=TRUE) # display the min salary print(min_salary)
Output:
[1] 72000
We now get the min value in the “Salary” column excluding the NA
values.
Summary – Minimum Value in an R Column
In this tutorial, we looked at how to compute the minimum value in a column of an R dataframe. The following is a short summary of the steps –
- Create a dataframe (skip this step if you already have a dataframe on which you want to operate).
- Use the
min()
function to compute the minimum value in the column. Pass the column vector as an argument. - If your column contains any NA values, pass
na.rm=TRUE
to themin()
function to calculate the minimum excluding theNA
values in the column.
You might also be interested in –
- How to Add a Column to a Dataframe in R?
- Rename Column Name in R Dataframe
- Select One or More Columns From R Dataframe
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