Days Between Dates
Calculate days, weeks, and months between two dates.
How to Use the Days Between Dates Calculator
The Days Between Dates calculator quickly finds how many days, weeks, months, hours, and minutes separate any two dates. It's useful for project planning, event countdown timers, calculating contract durations, figuring out deadlines, and tracking personal milestones.
Basic Usage
Select your start date and end date using the date pickers. Click Calculate to see the results. The calculator handles dates in either order — if you put the later date as the start, it still calculates correctly.
Excluding Weekends
Check the Exclude weekends option to count only business days (Monday through Friday). This is especially useful for calculating project timelines, delivery estimates, working days until a deadline, or any calculation where Saturdays and Sundays don't count. For example, if you have a 10 business-day deadline, you can find the exact calendar end date by working backward.
The Results Explained
- Total Days: The exact number of calendar days between the dates (or business days if the weekend exclusion option is active).
- Weeks: Total days divided by 7, showing whole weeks plus remaining days (e.g., "4 weeks, 3 days").
- Months (approx): Approximate months, calculated as total days ÷ 30.44 (average days per month).
- Hours: Total calendar days × 24.
- Minutes: Total hours × 60.
Both dates are shown with their day of the week, helping you quickly see whether a date falls on a weekend or specific workday.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Does the count include or exclude the start date?
The calculator counts the number of days between the two dates exclusive of the start date but inclusive of the end date, which is the standard mathematical difference between two dates. For example, from January 1 to January 5 is 4 days (Jan 2, 3, 4, 5 or simply 5 minus 1). If you want to include the start date (e.g., for a 5-day event starting on the 1st), add 1 to the result.
How are business days counted?
When "Exclude weekends" is checked, the calculator iterates through each day between the two dates and counts only Monday through Friday. Public holidays are NOT excluded — this calculator has no built-in holiday database. For counting business days that exclude specific national holidays, you would need to manually subtract the holidays that fall within your date range.
Can I calculate how many days ago a past date was?
Yes — set the start date to the past date and the end date to today. Or set the start date to today and the end date to a future date to calculate how many days until a future event. The calculator works for any date range — past, present, or future — as long as valid dates are entered in both fields.
What's the farthest future date I can enter?
HTML date inputs typically support dates up to December 31, 9999. The JavaScript Date object supports dates in that range as well. For practical purposes, the calculator works for any real-world planning horizon — from historical dates in the past to dates centuries in the future, though extremely large date ranges may produce very large numbers for hours and minutes.
Why are months shown as "approximate"?
Calendar months have different lengths (28–31 days), so there's no single exact conversion factor from days to months. This calculator uses 30.4375 days per month (the average over the Gregorian calendar cycle including leap years) to give an approximate month count. For an exact month count (e.g., "3 months and 5 days"), use the Age Calculator, which computes exact calendar months between two dates.