Day of the week calculator

Use John Conway's doomsday rule. In any year, 4 April, 6 June, 8 August, 10 October, 12 December, the last day of February, 9 May, 5 September, 11 July and 7 November share one weekday, the year's doomsday. In 2026 it is Saturday, so 12 December 2026 is a Saturday and 25 December, 13 days later, is a Friday.

No. A common year is 52 weeks and 1 day, so a date moves forward one weekday a year, or two when a 29 February comes between. A whole year's calendar usually repeats after 6, 11 or 28 years; 2026's is reused in 2037. The Gregorian calendar repeats exactly every 400 years, which are 146,097 days or 20,871 weeks.

It depends on the convention. ISO 8601 makes Monday day 1 and Sunday day 7, which is how the ISO weekday number here is counted. US calendars start on Sunday, and Excel's WEEKDAY function returns 1 for Sunday unless told otherwise. Zeller's own numbering starts at Saturday = 0, which is why the calculator shows it separately.

Nothing: the dates jumped, the weekdays did not. In Catholic countries Thursday 4 October 1582 in the Julian calendar was followed by Friday 15 October 1582 in the Gregorian calendar. Britain and its colonies changed in 1752, when Wednesday 2 September was followed by Thursday 14 September. For earlier dates, check which calendar a source uses before trusting a weekday.

Accuracy depends on your inputs and the method's assumptions. Decimal arithmetic uses 50 significant digits, but estimates, numerical methods and source data can be less precise; the displayed rounding does not remove those limits. It is checked against 5 worked examples whose answers come from independent sources; for example, “Apollo 11 Moon landing” is checked against NASA mission records (Sunday 20 July 1969); Python date(1969,7,20).weekday() = 6 (Sunday).

Chr. Zeller, “Kalender-Formeln”, Acta Mathematica 9 (1887), 131–136; Howard Hinnant — weekday_from_days.