How Many Days Are in a Year?

Short answer: a year has 365 days, or 366 in a leap year. That extra day lands on February 29 and shows up every four years. It sounds simple, but the reason behind it, and the exception that catches people out, are worth knowing. Here’s the full picture, with tables for every month and the leap-year rule.

Need the exact days between two specific dates? The days between dates calculator counts them for you, leap years included.

Why a year is 365 days (and sometimes 366)

A calendar year is our way of tracking one full orbit of Earth around the Sun. The catch is that the orbit doesn’t take a tidy whole number of days. It takes about 365.24 days.

If we just used 365 every year, the calendar would slowly drift out of sync with the seasons, by roughly one full day every four years. To fix that, we add one extra day, February 29, every four years. That’s a leap year, and it brings the average length of a year to about 365.25 days, which keeps the dates and seasons lined up.

The leap year rule, in full

Most people know the “every four years” part, but there’s an exception that trips people up. Here’s the complete rule.

• A year is a leap year if it’s divisible by 4.
• Except century years (like 1900 or 2100), which are only leap years if they’re divisible by 400.

So 2000 was a leap year, because it’s divisible by 400, but 1900 wasn’t, and 2100 won’t be. This extra step exists because 365.25 is still a tiny bit too long, so we skip three leap days every 400 years to stay accurate.

Year	Leap year?	Days
2024	Yes	366
2025	No	365
2026	No	365
2027	No	365
2028	Yes	366
2000	Yes	366
1900	No	365
2100	No	365

How many days are in each month?

Here’s where every month stands. The rhyme “thirty days has September, April, June, and November” covers the short ones, and the rest have 31, apart from February.

Month	Days
January	31
February	28 (29 in a leap year)
March	31
April	30
May	31
June	30
July	31
August	31
September	30
October	31
November	30
December	31

That’s seven months with 31 days, four with 30, and one oddball with 28 or 29.

A year in weeks, hours, and minutes

Since a year isn’t a whole number of weeks, the days don’t divide evenly, which is why your birthday shifts by a weekday each year. Here’s a year broken down other ways.

Unit	Common year (365 days)	Leap year (366 days)
Weeks	52 weeks + 1 day	52 weeks + 2 days
Hours	8,760	8,784
Minutes	525,600	526,240
Seconds	31,536,000	31,622,400

The single leftover day is why a fixed date, like July 9, falls one weekday later the next year, and two weekdays later after a leap year sneaks in.

How many days are left in this year?

That answer changes every day, so it’s the one thing a table can’t give you. To count the days from today to New Year’s Eve, or between any two dates, use the days between dates calculator. And to jump forward or back by a set number of days from any date, the date calculator does the addition for you.

Once you know the leap-year rule, the whole calendar makes sense: 365 days most years, one extra every four, and a clever exception every century to keep us perfectly on time.