How to Add Days to Date in Google Sheets

There may be a number of situations that require you to add days to a date in your worksheet. You might want to add a certain number of days up to a delivery date or add a security period of a few days to a given date.
Adding Days to a Date by Value in Google Sheets
Let’s say we want to add 10 days to each of the dates. In that case, all we need to do is use the formula:

=date+number_of_days
So if you want to add 10 days to the date “06/5/2021”, your formula would be:

=“06/05/2021”+10
Don’t forget to format the cell to the DATE format, or you will end up getting just a number, like this:

google sheets add days to date
To convert the cell into the DATE format, navigate to Format->Number->Date

google sheets add days to date
Now coming back to our original dataset. Let us look at the steps needed to add 10 to all the dates in column A:

In the first cell (B2), type the formula: =A2+10, followed by the return key
Drag the fill handle down to copy the formula to all the other cells of column B
All your dates should now have 10 days added to them.

google sheets add days to date
As you can see, all we needed to do was simply add the number of days, like we do in normal addition.

Let us take a look at another scenario where we need to add different numbers of days to each date, as shown below:

adding days to date google sheets
As you can see, we have each cell in column B tell us how many days we want to add to the corresponding date in column A. Let us see the steps needed to get our results in this case:

In the first cell (C2), type the formula: =A2+B2, followed by the return key.
Drag the fill handle down to copy the formula to all the other cells of column C.
adding days to date google sheets
That’s all there is to it! All we needed to do was add a reference to the cell containing the number of days to be added!

Explanation of the Formula
As you have surely noticed, we used a really simple addition formula to add the days to the dates, as if they were normal integers. The reason for this is that dates, in Google Sheets, are inherently represented as serial numbers. The serial starts from 1, which actually represents the date December 31, 1899. For each day after this date, the serial keeps increasing by 1.

So the date May 06, 2021 is actually serial 44322, because it is exactly 44,322 days after December 31, 1899. When you add days to a date in Google Sheets, it essentially adds this number to the serial number it represents. So when you add 10 days to 06/05/2021, what’s really happening is you are adding to the serial 44322.

44322+10 = 44332
This serial represents the date 16/05/2021, which is 10 days away from the original date!

What if I get a Serial Number as the Sum Instead of Date?
There may be cases where, instead of getting your result in a DATE format, you end up getting a serial number. This might happen if the cell containing your result is in a Number or Text format.

To solve this problem, you can easily convert the serial number to the DATE format by navigating to Format->Number->Date.

admin January 3, 2022

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How to Add Days to Date in Google Sheets

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Adding Days to a Date using the DATE Function in Google Sheets

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