When Is the Next Leap Year? Leap Year Calculator

Try an example

• 2028: a leap year, divisible by 4. February 29, 2028 is a Tuesday.
• 2000: a leap year because it is divisible by 400, the first century year to be one since 1600.
• 1900: not a leap year, although Excel still shows a February 29, 1900, a bug it kept from Lotus 1-2-3 so old spreadsheets would open the same.
• 1700: not a leap year in the Gregorian calendar, but a leap year in Britain and its American colonies, which still used the Julian calendar.

When is the next leap year?

The next leap year is 2028. February 29, 2028 falls on a Tuesday. The last one was 2024, when February 29 was a Thursday.

The ten leap years after 2026 are:

• 2028 Tue
• 2032 Sun
• 2036 Fri
• 2040 Wed
• 2044 Mon
• 2048 Sat
• 2052 Thu
• 2056 Tue
• 2060 Sun
• 2064 Fri

The short day name is the weekday of February 29 that year.

How to tell if a year is a leap year

The Gregorian calendar, used almost everywhere today, has three rules:

1. A year divisible by 4 is a leap year, such as 2024 and 2028.
2. Except a year divisible by 100, which is not, such as 1900 and 2100.
3. Except a year divisible by 400, which is a leap year after all, such as 1600 and 2000.

A quick way to check the first rule in your head: a number is divisible by 4 when its last two digits are. 2036 ends in 36, which is 4 × 9, so 2036 is a leap year. Only century years need the other two rules.

Why do we have leap years?

The year of the seasons, from one spring equinox to the next, is about 365.2422 days long. A calendar of 365 days falls behind by almost a quarter of a day each year, so without leap days the dates would drift through the seasons by about a month every 120 years.

Julius Caesar's Julian calendar added a day every fourth year, making its average year 365.25 days. That is about 11 minutes too long, which adds up to a day every 128 years. By 1582 the spring equinox had moved ten days earlier, so Pope Gregory XIII dropped ten days (Thursday, October 4, 1582 was followed by Friday, October 15) and removed three leap days every 400 years. That gives 97 leap years in every 400 and an average year of 365.2425 days, which drifts by only about a day in 3,000 years.

List of leap years from 1900 to 2100

There are 49 leap years from 1900 to 2100. Neither end is one: 1900 and 2100 are century years not divisible by 400, while 2000 is a leap year.

Leap years before 1582 and BC

Before October 1582 dates were written in the Julian calendar, where every fourth year was a leap year, century years included, so 1500 and 1300 had a February 29. This calculator gives the Gregorian answer for every year and adds the Julian one when it differs. Countries switched at different times: Britain and its colonies in 1752, Russia in 1918 and Greece in 1923, so 1700, 1800 and 1900 were leap years in some places and not others.

The Julian calendar began in 45 BC. For its first decades Rome added the leap day every third year by mistake, and Augustus fixed it by skipping leap days until about AD 8, so the leap years of that period are uncertain. Before 45 BC there were no leap days in the modern sense.

For years BC the rules apply to the astronomical year number, where 1 BC is year 0 and 5 BC is year -4, because there is no year zero between 1 BC and AD 1. So the leap years BC are 1 BC, 5 BC, 9 BC and so on, not 4 BC and 8 BC. To count the years between dates either side of the line, use the BC/AD years calculator.

Leap day birthdays

February 29 comes 97 times in every 146,097 days, about once in every 1,506 days, so roughly one person in 1,500 is born on it. In a common year most people born on a leap day celebrate on February 28 or March 1. Someone born on February 29, 2024 has their next birthday on the actual date in 2028.

Related tools

To find a date's day number, or which day of the year February 29 is, use the day of the year calculator. To find the weekday of any date, BC or AD, use the day of the week calculator. To see what century a year is in, use the century calculator. To find the date 90 days from today, leap days counted, use the days from today calculator.

Leap days on a timeline

Leap days are one of the details that make counting across years easy to get wrong. To see events years or centuries apart laid out at their true distance, Preceden can put them on a timeline.