Calculating the Difference in Months Between Two Dates

function monthDiff(d1, d2) {

    var months;

    months = (d2.getFullYear() - d1.getFullYear()) * 12;

    months -= d1.getMonth();

    months += d2.getMonth();

    return months <= 0 ? 0 : months;

}


function test(d1, d2) {

    var diff = monthDiff(d1, d2);

    console.log(

        d1.toISOString().substring(0, 10),

        "to",

        d2.toISOString().substring(0, 10),

        ":",

        diff

    );

}


test(

    new Date(2008, 10, 4), // November 4th, 2008

    new Date(2010, 2, 12)  // March 12th, 2010

);

// Result: 16


test(

    new Date(2010, 0, 1),  // January 1st, 2010

    new Date(2010, 2, 12)  // March 12th, 2010

);

// Result: 2


test(

    new Date(2010, 1, 1),  // February 1st, 2010

    new Date(2010, 2, 12)  // March 12th, 2010

);

// Result: 1

Difference in months between two dates

Assuming the day of the month is irrelevant (i.e. the diff between 2011.1.1 and 2010.12.31 is 1), with date1 > date2 giving a positive value and date2 > date1 a negative value

((date1.Year - date2.Year) * 12) + date1.Month - date2.Month

Or, assuming you want an approximate number of 'average months' between the two dates, the following should work for all but very huge date differences.

date1.Subtract(date2).Days / (365.25 / 12)

Note, if you were to use the latter solution then your unit tests should state the widest date range which your application is designed to work with and validate the results of the calculation accordingly.

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Update (with thanks to Gary)

If using the 'average months' method, a slightly more accurate number to use for the 'average number of days per year' is 365.2425.

Best way to find the months between two dates

Update 2018-04-20: it seems that OP @Joshkunz was asking for finding which months are between two dates, instead of "how many months" are between two dates. So I am not sure why @JohnLaRooy is upvoted for more than 100 times. @Joshkunz indicated in the comment under the original question he wanted the actual dates [or the months], instead of finding the total number of months.

So it appeared the question wanted, for between two dates 2018-04-11 to 2018-06-01

Apr 2018, May 2018, June 2018 

And what if it is between 2014-04-11 to 2018-06-01? Then the answer would be

Apr 2014, May 2014, ..., Dec 2014, Jan 2015, ..., Jan 2018, ..., June 2018

So that's why I had the following pseudo code many years ago. It merely suggested using the two months as end points and loop through them, incrementing by one month at a time. @Joshkunz mentioned he wanted the "months" and he also mentioned he wanted the "dates", without knowing exactly, it was difficult to write the exact code, but the idea is to use one simple loop to loop through the end points, and incrementing one month at a time.

The answer 8 years ago in 2010:

If adding by a week, then it will approximately do work 4.35 times the work as needed. Why not just:

1. get start date in array of integer, set it to i: [2008, 3, 12], 
       and change it to [2008, 3, 1]
2. get end date in array: [2010, 10, 26]
3. add the date to your result by parsing i
       increment the month in i
       if month is >= 13, then set it to 1, and increment the year by 1
   until either the year in i is > year in end_date, 
           or (year in i == year in end_date and month in i > month in end_date)

just pseduo code for now, haven't tested, but i think the idea along the same line will work.

How can I calculate the number of months between two given dates ( baseline and follow-up)

Here is an option with lubridate

library(dplyr)
library(lubridate)
df1 %>%
      mutate(Months_difference = (interval(mdy(Baseline), 
             mdy(Follow_Up))) %/% months(1))

calculating the difference in months between two dates

You won't be able to get that from a TimeSpan, because a "month" is a variable unit of measure. You'll have to calculate it yourself, and you'll have to figure out how exactly you want it to work.

For example, should dates like July 5, 2009 and August 4, 2009 yield one month or zero months difference? If you say it should yield one, then what about July 31, 2009 and August 1, 2009? Is that a month? Is it simply the difference of the Month values for the dates, or is it more related to an actual span of time? The logic for determining all of these rules is non-trivial, so you'll have to determine your own and implement the appropriate algorithm.

If all you want is simply a difference in the months--completely disregarding the date values--then you can use this:

public static int MonthDifference(this DateTime lValue, DateTime rValue)
{
    return (lValue.Month - rValue.Month) + 12 * (lValue.Year - rValue.Year);
}

Note that this returns a relative difference, meaning that if rValue is greater than lValue, then the return value will be negative. If you want an absolute difference, you can use this:

public static int MonthDifference(this DateTime lValue, DateTime rValue)
{
    return Math.Abs((lValue.Month - rValue.Month) + 12 * (lValue.Year - rValue.Year));
}

How to calculate months between two dates including the starting date month?

You can use Carbon:

use \Carbon\Carbon;
$from = Carbon::createFromFormat('Y-d-m', '2018-17-09');
$to = Carbon::createFromFormat('Y-d-m', '2018-30-12')->addMonth();

return $to->diffInMonths($from);

Live demo here

Calculating number of full months between two dates in SQL

The original post had some bugs... so I re-wrote and packaged it as a UDF.

CREATE FUNCTION FullMonthsSeparation 
(
    @DateA DATETIME,
    @DateB DATETIME
)
RETURNS INT
AS
BEGIN
    DECLARE @Result INT

    DECLARE @DateX DATETIME
    DECLARE @DateY DATETIME

    IF(@DateA < @DateB)
    BEGIN
        SET @DateX = @DateA
        SET @DateY = @DateB
    END
    ELSE
    BEGIN
        SET @DateX = @DateB
        SET @DateY = @DateA
    END

    SET @Result = (
                    SELECT 
                    CASE 
                        WHEN DATEPART(DAY, @DateX) > DATEPART(DAY, @DateY)
                        THEN DATEDIFF(MONTH, @DateX, @DateY) - 1
                        ELSE DATEDIFF(MONTH, @DateX, @DateY)
                    END
                    )

    RETURN @Result
END
GO

SELECT dbo.FullMonthsSeparation('2009-04-16', '2009-05-15') as MonthSep -- =0
SELECT dbo.FullMonthsSeparation('2009-04-16', '2009-05-16') as MonthSep -- =1
SELECT dbo.FullMonthsSeparation('2009-04-16', '2009-06-16') as MonthSep -- =2

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