Days Between Dates
Exact days, weekdays and calendar months.
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Should I count both the start and end date?
It depends what you are counting. Exclusive counting — the default here — suits hotel nights, interest accrual and anything measuring elapsed time: 1 March to 3 March is two days. Inclusive counting suits holiday entitlement, jury service, rental days and most legal deadlines, where the day itself is the unit: the same span is three days. Tick the box to switch.
Does this handle leap years?
Yes, including the rule most people forget. A year is a leap year if divisible by 4, unless divisible by 100, unless also divisible by 400. So 2024 was, 2023 was not, 1900 was not, and 2000 was. Spans crossing 29 February are counted correctly because the calculation walks the real calendar rather than assuming a 365-day year.
Are public holidays excluded from the weekday count?
No. The weekday figure excludes Saturdays and Sundays only. Statutory holidays vary by province in Canada, by state in the US and by country everywhere else, so no general-purpose tool can get them right. For a genuine business-day count — a payment term or contractual notice period — subtract the holidays for your jurisdiction yourself.
Why do other calculators give me a different answer?
Almost always the inclusive-versus-exclusive question above. The other common cause is daylight saving: tools that subtract two timestamps get 23 hours across a spring-forward, which floors to zero days. This tool converts each date to a civil-calendar day number and subtracts those, so the answer never depends on timezone or the time of day you load the page.
Can I use dates far in the past or future?
Yes. The calculation uses a proleptic Gregorian calendar with no epoch limits, so dates well before 1970 and centuries into the future work correctly. Note that dates before the Gregorian reform — 1582 in Catholic Europe, 1752 in the British Empire — are projected backwards and will not match historical records from those periods.
About days between dates
Inclusive or exclusive?
This is the question that makes two people calculating the same gap get different answers. By default the count is exclusive: from 1 March to 3 March is two days, because you count the nights between, not the dates touched. Tick “count both the start and end date” and it becomes three — the inclusivecount.
Which one you want depends entirely on what you are counting:
- Exclusive for hotel nights, interest accrual, notice periods and anything measured in elapsed time.
- Inclusive for holiday entitlement, jury service, prison sentences, rental days and most legal deadlines — where the day itself is the unit being counted.
Legal deadlines are worth extra care. Many statutes say a period “begins on the day after” an event, which is exclusive at the start but inclusive at the end. If a real deadline depends on it, read the wording rather than trusting any calculator.
Why not just subtract two timestamps?
Because daylight saving quietly breaks it. Subtracting two timestamps that span a spring-forward gives 23 hours, which floors to zero days; an autumn transition gives 25 and can round to two. The bug is subtle and only shows up twice a year, which is exactly why it survives in production code for so long.
This tool never touches timestamps. It converts each date to a day number computed purely from the civil calendar and subtracts those, so the answer is the same regardless of timezone, daylight saving or when you happen to load the page.
Leap years, including the rule everyone forgets
A year is a leap year if it is divisible by 4 — unless it is divisible by 100, unless it is also divisible by 400. So 2024 was a leap year, 2023 was not, 1900 was not, and 2000 was. That last clause caught a great deal of software in 1999, and catches spreadsheet formulas to this day.
The weekday count
The weekday figure excludes Saturdays and Sundays only. It does not know about statutory holidays, which vary by province in Canada, by state in the US and by country everywhere else. For a genuine business-day count — a payment term, a contractual notice period — subtract the public holidays in the relevant jurisdiction yourself.
Related
Browse the rest of the date tools, or work out an exact age with the age calculator.