Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Calculating the Day of the Year.

Calculating the Day of the Year

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated October 24, 2022)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365


6

You've probably seen it on calendars before—some include an indication that "Today is the 123 day of the year with 242 remaining." You can easily calculate the day number of a year, as well as how many are remaining. For instance, let's assume you have a date in cell D27. You could use the following formulas to calculate, respectively, what day of the year it is and how many are still left:

=D27-"12/31/2017"
="12/31/2018"-D27

The reason that the first formula uses a date of 12/31/2018 is so the result will show the actual day number. Using these formulas, the result of 1/1/2018 in cell D27 would result in 1, meaning it is the first day of the year. (This is as it should be.)

Of course, once you enter the formulas, you need to format the cells as regular numbers. (Excel will, by default, try to format the cells as dates.) With the two cells selected, follow these steps:

  1. Display the Home tab of the ribbon.
  2. Click the small icon at the lower-right corner of the Number group. Excel displays the Format Cells dialog box.
  3. Make sure the Number tab is selected.
  4. In the Category list, choose Number. (See Figure 1.)
  5. Figure 1. The Number tab of the Format Cells dialog box.

  6. Make sure the Decimal Places option is set to 0.
  7. Click on OK.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (8727) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Excel in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Calculating the Day of the Year.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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Comments

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What is 8 - 2?

2022-10-24 08:22:23

Joe Lamontagne

I believe that in this sentence, "The reason that the first formula uses a date of 12/31/2018...," "2018" should be "2017."


2022-10-24 06:41:21

Phil Vaughan

Hi Allen,

Calculating the day of the year...

How about the following:

=DAYS(D27,CONCATENATE("31/12/",YEAR(D27)-1)) ' Day of the year
=DAYS(CONCATENATE("31/12/",YEAR(D27)),D27)+1 ' Days to go in the year

Cheers, Phil


2018-08-06 14:25:13

D Dodge

A more generic formula not limited to 2018 would be:
=TODAY()-CONCAT("1/1/",YEAR(TODAY()))
This gives you the day number for today. Replace both TODAY() with a cell reference if you want the day number for a specific date in your spreadsheet.

The number of days remaining can also be year independent:
=IF(MOD(YEAR(TODAY()),4)=0,366-A1,365-A1)
where A1 is the cell containing the day of year number calculation. Again, replace TODAY() with a cell reference if a specific date other than today is used. As mentioned in the article, both cells need to be formatted as NUMBER with zero decimal points.


2018-08-05 10:29:46

Allen

Simon, you are correct. I changed the article to reflect 2018, as it should.

-Allen


2018-08-05 04:01:50

Simon Freeman

(A) Don't forget to change the date to 31/12/2017 in countries where dd/mm/yyyy is the norm.
(B) Shouldn't the date in the second formula be 12/31/2018 (not 2017) to get the days to the end of the year.


2018-08-04 06:53:20

Russell

=D27-Date(Year(D27),1,0)

would also work, and means you don't have to manually enter the year


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