Days until a date

How a day countdown works

A count of days until a date is a subtraction: the target’s position in the calendar minus today’s. It moves once a day, at midnight where you are, and it stays right however long you leave the tab open. What it doesn’t do is measure 24-hour blocks. At 11 PM, tomorrow is “1 day away” although only an hour remains until it begins. The live clock under the main figure answers the other question: exactly how many hours, minutes and seconds remain until the start of that day.

Both numbers are useful, and they often look like they disagree. At noon on Monday, Wednesday is 2 days away by calendar count, and 1 day and 12 hours away by the clock. For planning, use the calendar count. For anything that starts at a particular moment, enter the time as well.

Why two people can see different numbers

Dates change at midnight, and midnight arrives at different moments around the world. When it is already Tuesday morning in Sydney, it is still Monday afternoon in New York, so the same date can be one day closer for one of them. This tool always uses your device’s time zone. For an event at a fixed moment, such as a broadcast or a product launch, convert its time into your zone first with the time zone converter, and enter the result.

Daylight saving inside a countdown

When a span crosses a clock change, the number of real hours differs from days × 24. A wait that includes the spring change is one hour shorter, and one that includes the autumn change is one hour longer. The clock here counts actual elapsed time in your zone, so it allows for this and the day figure stays the same. Two edge cases can occur if you pick a time on the change date itself. A time such as 2:30 AM can be skipped altogether in spring, and in autumn it can occur twice. The tool tells you when this happens. In the first case it counts as if the clocks had not moved, which reads one hour later on the new clock (2:30 becomes 3:30); in the second it counts to the first occurrence. That is the rule of the iCalendar standard (RFC 5545) that calendar software follows.

Counting to dates that move

Some events have a rule instead of a fixed date. Thanksgiving in the United States is the fourth Thursday of November and Labor Day is the first Monday of September, so their dates change each year while their weekdays stay the same. Western Easter is calculated from a church computus tied to the moon and can fall anywhere from March 22 to April 25. The table above applies those rules to the next occurrence. Festivals on lunar or lunisolar calendars need a converted date, and for those the Islamic date page explains why published dates can differ by a day between countries.

The arithmetic, if you want to do it by hand

Count the days left in this month, add the full months, then add the target’s day number. From March 10 to June 8: 21 days left in March, 30 in April, 31 in May, and 8 in June, for 90 days. If the span crosses February 29 of a leap year, that day is already part of February’s length. A shortcut for dates a few weeks off is to count whole weeks, since each one keeps the weekday. Then add the odd days.

To work out the same number in a spreadsheet, use =A1-TODAY() with the target date in A1, and format the result as a number. It recalculates each time the sheet opens.

What the other figures mean

• Weeks and days is the calendar count divided by seven, with the remainder as days.
• Weekdays counts Mondays to Fridays after today, up to and including the target. It ignores public holidays. The business days calculator handles holidays and other weekends.
• Weekend days is the remainder of the span.
• Sleeps is the number of nights before the date, which is the same as the day count.

Sharing a countdown

The Copy link button creates a URL with the date and any time you entered. Anyone who opens it sees the same target date and clock time, computed on their device for their own time zone. The times in the link are local, so “5 PM” means 5 PM wherever it is opened. To share one fixed moment worldwide, send the event in UTC or use the exact time to agree on it. The page sends nothing about your date to our server unless you share the link: a link with a date in it is an ordinary address, so its date is part of the request when someone opens it.

Looking for something else? The timer counts down a fixed length, days between dates compares any two dates, and days from today goes the other way, from a number of days to a date.