Days between two dates

How to use it

1. Pick the start date and the end date.
2. The totals update immediately — days, weeks, months, and working days.
3. The order does not matter; the difference is shown either way.

Clear days, nights and hire periods are all counted differently

English civil procedure defines a period expressed in days as clear days, excluding the day the period begins and the day the relevant event occurs, and where the period is five days or fewer, weekends and bank holidays are left out as well. A deadline written as within 7 days is therefore not the gap reported here until you adjust for the convention the document is using.

Commerce is no more consistent. A hotel bills nights, so Friday to Sunday is two. Car hire bills 24-hour periods from collection, so a late pick-up and an early return can still be charged as three days. A three-day travel pass usually means three calendar days including the day of first use, expiring at midnight rather than 72 hours after activation.

Working days are jurisdictional and week numbers are not obvious

Removing Saturday and Sunday is the easy part. Public holidays diverge within a single country: Scotland has 2 January where England and Wales do not, and Northern Ireland adds 17 March and 12 July. Holidays fixed to the Islamic or Hebrew calendars move against the Gregorian one each year, so any hard-coded list goes stale. Financial settlement uses its own published calendars for exactly this reason.

Week numbering carries a comparable trap. Under ISO 8601 a week runs Monday to Sunday and week 1 is the week containing the first Thursday of January, equivalently the week containing 4 January, so 1 January can sit in week 52 or 53 of the previous year and a year holds 52 or 53 weeks rather than a fixed count. North American convention starts the week on Sunday and numbers from the week containing 1 January, so one date can carry two different week numbers.

Questions