How to Add Months to a Date in Excel

To add months to a date, use =EDATE(A1,1) for one month ahead, =EDATE(A1,3) for three, and =EDATE(A1,6) for six. To go backwards, use a negative number — =EDATE(A1,-6) gives you the date six months earlier. EDATE keeps the same day of the month and handles year rollovers on its own, so adding 3 months to 15-Nov-2026 correctly returns 15-Feb-2027.

Two things to know. If the result shows up as a serial number like 44927, the cell is formatted as General — press Ctrl+1 and set it to Date.

And when the target month is shorter, EDATE moves the date back rather than spilling over: 31-Jan plus one month returns 28-Feb, not 3-Mar. If you always want the last day of the resulting month instead, use EOMONTH: =EOMONTH(A1,1).

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Add Month to a Date (Next Month’s Date)

Add 6 Months to a Date

Add 3 Months to a Date

Subtract Months from a Date

Related Formulas

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Just like years, you can add months in a date to get a future date and subtract to get a date from the past. In this tutorial, we will look at all the methods with multiple examples to do that.

Add Month to a Date (Next Month’s Date)

In the first example, we will write a formula to get the date from the next month and we will use the EDATE formula. As you can see in the following example, we have a date in cell A1, for which we need to get the exact date for the next month.

Follow the below steps:

First, enter “=EDATE(” in cell B1.
After that, refer to cell A1, where you have the date.
Now, in the second argument, enter 1.
In the end, type a closing parenthesis and hit enter.

Here you have the date 10-Feb-2022 in cell B1 which is exactly 1 month ahead (next month) from the date we have specified in the formula.

=EDATE(A1,1)

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Add 6 Months to a Date

In the same way, you can add 6 months to a date and get a date that is 6 months ahead of the current date. In the following example, we have the same date in cell A1 that we had earlier.