Incremental refresh doubt

Hi askme1217 ,

incremental refresh uses the date column and the RangeStart/RangeEnd window, not calendar days. With yearly dates, you’ll still get partitions for the years that fall into the incremental window.

In your scenario:

Refresh date: 10/01/2026
You configured: Archive last 10 years, refresh last 2 years incrementally
The incremental window = [RangeEnd - 2 years, RangeEnd] = roughly [2024-10-01, 2026-10-01]
With yearly dates (01/01/YYYY):
The partitions that exist in that window are typically 2025-01-01 and 2026-01-01 (if those rows exist in your fact table).
So you will refresh those two yearly partitions (2025 and 2026), and older years (2021–2024) are archived unless their dates fall into the window.

Note: 

If there is no data for 2026-01-01 yet, that year won’t be refreshed even if you expect it to.
The window is always calculated at refresh time (RangeEnd is the refresh time). It doesn’t look back “two calendar years from today” independent of data presence.
For predictable behavior, it’s usually best to have a daily-granularity date column (a proper calendar table) used for the incremental range, even if your fact table only contains year-start dates. That helps Power BI fold the query cleanly and makes the window behavior consistent.

Please mark this post as solution if it helps you. Appreciate Kudos.