  Taking advantage of the reduced levels of noise and systematics in the data
of the latest Planck release (PR4, also known as NPIPE), we construct a new
all-sky Compton-$y$ parameter map (hereafter, $y$-map) of the thermal
Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) effect from the Planck PR4 data. A tailored Needlet
Internal Linear Combination (NILC) pipeline, first validated on detailed sky
simulations, is applied to the nine single-frequency Planck PR4 sky maps,
ranging from $30$ to $857$ GHz, to produce the PR4 $y$-map over 98% of the sky.
Using map comparisons, angular power spectra and one-point statistics we show
that the PR4 NILC $y$-map is of improved quality compared to that of the
previous PR2 release. The new $y$-map shows reduced levels of large-scale
striations associated with $1/f$ noise in the scan direction. Regions near the
Galactic plane also show lower residual contamination by Galactic thermal dust
emission. At small angular scales, the residual contamination by thermal noise
and cosmic infrared background (CIB) emission is found to be reduced by around
7% and 34%, respectively, in the PR4 $y$-map. The PR4 NILC $y$-map is made
publicly available for astrophysical and cosmological analyses of the thermal
SZ effect.
