What Day of the Week Is It? Day of the Week Calculator

Try an example

• The Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776): a Thursday.
• September 11, 2001: a Tuesday, the second of the month.
• Christmas 2026 (December 25, 2026): a Friday.
• Columbus reaches the Americas (October 12, 1492, a Julian date): a Friday. Read as a Gregorian date it would be a Wednesday.

What day of the week is it today?

Today is Wednesday, November 11, 2026, going by the date on your device, so the answer follows your own time zone.

Which number day of the week that is depends on where the week starts. Calendars in the United States usually start it on Sunday, which makes Wednesday the fourth day. The ISO 8601 standard, used across most of Europe, starts it on Monday, which makes Wednesday the third. The same split is why week numbers can disagree, and the day of the year calculator shows both.

What date was last Friday?

Counting from today, Wednesday, November 11, 2026, here is the most recent and the coming date for each day of the week. Today's own weekday shows the dates a week ago and a week ahead.

The table gives the nearest date each way. Some people use "next Friday" for the Friday of next week even when another Friday comes first, so in that sense the date may be seven days later than the one shown. "Last Friday" can work the same way, seven days earlier.

What day is Christmas this year?

Christmas 2026 is on a Friday, and Halloween 2026 is on a Saturday. These holidays keep their date, so their weekday moves one day later each year, or two after a leap day.

How the day of the week is worked out

The calculator turns the date into a day count (the Julian Day Number astronomers use, which counts every day in order since 4713 BC) and takes the remainder after dividing by seven. The weeks have run in an unbroken cycle of seven for as far back as the count goes, so the remainder gives the weekday.

It also tells you which week of the month the date falls in, which is how many holidays are set: Thanksgiving in the United States is the fourth Thursday of November, and Mother's Day the second Sunday of May.

In the Gregorian calendar the pattern repeats exactly every 400 years. Those 400 years hold 146,097 days, which is exactly 20,871 weeks, so a date falls on the same weekday as the same date 400 years earlier.

Julian and Gregorian dates

The calendar most of the world uses today, the Gregorian calendar, began in October 1582. To bring the calendar back in line with the seasons, ten dates were skipped: Thursday, October 4, 1582 was followed by Friday, October 15. The dates jumped, but the weekdays carried on in order.

Not every country switched at once. Britain and its American colonies kept the older Julian calendar until 1752, when Wednesday, September 2 was followed by Thursday, September 14. Russia switched in 1918 and Greece in 1923. So the same written date can mean two different days. That is why the calculator reads a date from before October 15, 1582 as a Julian date first, and gives both readings for dates up to 1752.

For dates BC, the calculator extends the Julian calendar backwards. The Romans did not apply its leap years correctly until about AD 8, and the seven-day week was only then coming into use in the Roman world, so treat a weekday from those years as the one the calendar implies rather than one anyone wrote down.

Working it out in your head: the Doomsday rule

The mathematician John Conway noticed that some easy-to-remember dates always fall on the same weekday as each other in any given year: 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12, 5/9, 9/5, 7/11, 11/7, March 14 and the last day of February. He called that weekday the year's doomsday.

To find a year's doomsday, start from its century's anchor day (Wednesday for the 1900s, Tuesday for the 2000s). Take the last two digits of the year, and add up how many twelves fit into them, the remainder, and how many fours fit into that remainder. Count that many days on from the anchor.

For September 11, 2001: the last two digits are 01, which holds no twelves, a remainder of 1, and no fours in that, so the total is 1. One day on from Tuesday is Wednesday, so 9/5 was a Wednesday in 2001. September 11 is six days after September 5, which makes it a Tuesday.

Friday the 13th

Every year has at least one Friday the 13th and never more than three. 2026 has three, in February, March and November, and 2027 has just one, in August. Over the full 400-year cycle the 13th of a month lands on a Friday 688 times, slightly more often than on any other day of the week.

Related tools

To find the date halfway between two dates, with its weekday, use the date midpoint calculator. To count how many years ago a year was, BC or AD, use the BC/AD years calculator. To write a birthday or anniversary in Roman numerals, use the Roman numeral date converter. To find which day of the year a date is, and its week number, use the day of the year calculator. To find how old someone was when they died, use the age at death calculator. To see when the next Friday the 13th is, and every one in a year, use the Friday the 13th calculator.

Putting dates in order

Knowing the weekday of one date is a start. When you have a whole run of them, Preceden can put them on a timeline, so you can see what happened when and how the gaps compare.