How to Use TODAY in Excel
Returns the current date, refreshed every time the workbook recalculates — the anchor for ageing reports.
What is TODAY in Microsoft Excel?
TODAY takes no arguments and returns today's date as a serial number, formatted as a date. Every ageing report, SLA tracker and days-remaining calculation starts here: subtract an invoice date from TODAY and you have the number of days outstanding.
Formula Syntax
Arguments Breakdown
| Argument | Requirement | Purpose & Details |
|---|
When to Use TODAY (Real-World Business Scenarios)
- 1
Calculating invoice age with =TODAY()-B2 and formatting the result as a number.
- 2
Highlighting overdue rows with conditional formatting when the due date is before TODAY().
- 3
Building a 'days remaining' countdown for a deadline column.
Step-by-Step Practical Business Example
Suppose you have the following dataset in Excel cells A1:D4:
| Invoice | Invoice Date | Days Outstanding |
|---|---|---|
| INV-101 | 2026-10-01 | 34 |
| INV-102 | 2026-10-20 | 15 |
| INV-103 | 2026-11-01 | 3 |
How it works: Subtracts the invoice date from today's date. The result is a plain number of days, so format the cell as General rather than Date.
Common Errors & How to Fix Them
Why it happens: Excel copied the date format from the source cell, so 34 days displays as a date in 1900.
Fix: Change the cell format to General or Number.
Why it happens: Calculation is set to Manual, so volatile functions are not recalculated.
Fix: Press F9 to recalculate, or set Formulas > Calculation Options back to Automatic.
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Frequently Asked Questions (TODAY)
What does the TODAY formula do in Excel?
TODAY takes no arguments and returns today's date as a serial number, formatted as a date. Every ageing report, SLA tracker and days-remaining calculation starts here: subtract an invoice date from TODAY and you have the number of days outstanding.
What is the syntax for TODAY?
What are common mistakes when using TODAY?
Result shows as a date: Excel copied the date format from the source cell, so 34 days displays as a date in 1900. (Change the cell format to General or Number.) Value does not update: Calculation is set to Manual, so volatile functions are not recalculated. (Press F9 to recalculate, or set Formulas > Calculation Options back to Automatic.)
Related Excel Formulas
Keep building your formula toolkit with these date & time functions.
- DATEDIFReturns the difference between two dates in complete years, months or days — the standard way to calculate age and tenure.
- EOMONTHReturns the last day of a month, any number of months before or after a given date — the backbone of monthly reporting.
- NETWORKDAYSCounts working days between two dates while excluding weekends and your own holiday list.
- EDATEAdds or subtracts whole months from a date while keeping the same day of the month — perfect for due dates and renewals.
- XLOOKUPThe modern, versatile replacement for VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP that searches in any direction without column index numbers.
- VLOOKUPThe industry-standard vertical lookup function that searches the first column of a table and returns a value in the same row.
Master TODAY in Basic Excel
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