Adding Months to a Date in Excel

Similar to adding years to a date, you can add months to a date to get a future date, or subtract months to get a past date. In this tutorial, we will cover various methods with multiple examples.

Adding a Month to a Date (Using the EDATE Formula) To get the exact date for the next month, we can use the EDATE formula. Let’s say we have a date in cell A1 and we want to find the date for the next month.

Adding Months to a Date in Excel

Follow these steps:

1. In cell B1, enter the formula “=EDATE(“
2. Refer to cell A1 where you have the date.
3. In the second argument, enter the number of months you want to add. For the next month, enter 1.
4. Type a closing parenthesis and hit enter.

The result will be the date for the next month in cell B1, which is exactly 1 month ahead of the original date.

Example: =EDATE(A1,1)

Adding 6 Months to a Date Similarly, we can add 6 months to a date to get a date that is 6 months ahead of the current date. For example, if we have the same date in cell A1 as before, to add 6 months we can use the following formula:

Example: =EDATE(A1,6)

Adding 3 Months to a Date To add 3 months to a date, we can use the EDATE formula in the same way as before:

Example: =EDATE(A1,3)

Subtracting Months from a Date To subtract months from a date, simply use a negative number in the second argument of the EDATE formula. For example, to get a date 6 months in the past from 10-Jan-22 (in cell A1), use the following formula:

Example: =EDATE(A1,-6)

This will give us the date 10-Jul-21 in cell B1, which is exactly 6 months before the original date.