Add or Remove Months from Date in Excel

If you want to add months to a date, you can use the EDATE function. It returns a date the N months in the past or future. 

Here’s how the syntax looks like.

Add months to a date

Take a look at the following example.

If A1 contains the following date:

December 25, 2019, you can see the date 2 months into the future. By default, it will return the serial number. If you read my article on how Excel stores dates, you will know why it is the case.

If you want to display the result as a normal date, click A2 navigate to Home >> Clipboard and click Format Painter. Next, click cell C2 to apply the formating.

You can display dates way into the future, to the year 9999.

Add months to date from today

If you want to add months, not to the particular date in time, but to the current date, you can use the TODAY or NOW functions.

Both formulas are going to return the same result:

In my case (January 15, 2020), it’s March 15, 2020.

Remove months from date

You can also remove months from a date by using the negative numbers. Here are a few examples.

When it comes to subtracting dates, the earliest date is 1900, before that Excel will return the #NUM! error.

Tomasz Decker is an Excel specialist, skilled in data analysis and financial modeling.