Life Calculator

Date & Time Calculators

5 free date & time calculators, each explaining its formula.

Ages, durations, deadlines, working days and time zones — the calculations that are deceptively easy to get wrong by one day.

About this section

Date arithmetic looks trivial and is not. Months have different lengths, years occasionally have an extra day, time zones shift twice a year in many places, and there are two entirely legitimate ways to count the days between two dates that differ by one.

That last point causes more practical problems than any other. From the first of the month to the third is two days later and covers three days. A contract saying “within fourteen days” and one saying “fourteen clear days” produce different deadlines. A hotel stay of three nights spans four calendar days. None of these is ambiguous once stated; all of them are ambiguous when assumed.

Adding months is worse, because there is no correct answer to what falls one month after the thirty-first of January. The convention almost all software uses, and the one applied here, is to clamp to the last day of the shorter month. That convention is not reversible, which means chaining month additions accumulates drift — a detail that matters for anyone calculating a schedule of recurring dates.

The tools below work in coordinated universal time throughout, so a day is always exactly twenty-four hours and daylight saving transitions cannot introduce a spurious extra day. Each page states which convention it uses and why.