How to Create a Formula to Increase a Date by 1 Month

Last Updated: October 25, 2022

Microsoft Excel is a powerful program. If you are using it for a calendar or anything else where you might need to find the date exactly 1, 2, or 3 months after another date here is a formula you can use.

Things You Should Know

The DATE function makes it easy to increment dates by days, months, or years.
When editing a formula with the DATE function, you can simply add +1 to the month.
You can also use the EDATE function to increase the date by one month.

Steps

1
Turn on your computer and open a new or existing Excel spreadsheet.
2
In any cell, for this example we will use A2, type in you date. Ex. 1/1/2006

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3
In a different cell, for this example we used B2, type in the amount of months cell A2 is to be incremented by. Ex. 5
4
In the last cell type the formula:
=DATE(YEAR(A2),MONTH(A2)+B2,MIN(DAY(A2),DAY(DATE(YEAR(A2),MONTH(A2)+B2+1,0))))replacing what is in bold with the appropriate cells for your spreadsheet.
5
You will see that this cell now has the calculation desired.
6
Another option is to use =EDATE(start_date,months)
This is a simpler method but can only be used if the Analysis ToolPak add-in is installed.