Today’s Julian date is 26315

Today’s codes

Day of the year

315

YYDDD

26315

YYYYDDD

2026315

ISO 8601 ordinal date

2026-315

Julian Day, now (UTC)

2461356.47747

Modified Julian Date, now

61355.97747

The day-of-year codes follow your local date. The Julian Day and Modified Julian Date are the same everywhere at a given instant, counted in Universal Time; they update every second.

Day-of-year calendar for 2026

Each day shows its date (small) and its day-of-year number (large). Today is highlighted. In a leap year every date from March 1 on is one higher than in a common year.

The “Julian date” on packages, forms and in the military

In everyday use, a Julian date usually means the ordinal date: the number of the day within the year, from 001 on January 1 to 365, or 366 in a leap year. ISO 8601 calls this the ordinal date and writes it year-day, as in 2026-315. Codes written without separators are common in industry:

• YYDDD: two-digit year and three-digit day, such as 26315 for today.
• YYYYDDD: four-digit year and day, such as 2026315, used in databases and mainframe systems because it sorts in date order.
• YDDD: the last digit of the year and the day. US military supply documents use this four-position “ordinal date”; the Defense Logistics Agency’s manual gives the example 3056 for 25 February 2003, and notes that the term “Julian day” is not used for it (DLM 4000.25).

On food, the US Department of Agriculture has described egg cartons carrying the pack date as a three-digit “Julian date”, 001 for January 1 through 365 for December 31, and can codes as packing numbers that may refer to the date or time of manufacture, with no single key to translate them (USDA FSIS fact sheet, archived 2008). Manufacturers choose their own formats, so a code is only a date if the maker says so.

The astronomers’ Julian Day

Astronomers use a different Julian date: a continuous count of days and fractions of a day since noon Universal Time on January 1, 4713 BC in the Julian calendar. Because the count starts at noon, 0h UT has a fraction of .5, and the day of the week follows from the remainder of the Julian Day Number divided by 7, where 0 is Monday and 6 is Sunday (U.S. Naval Observatory). Today at noon UT the Julian Day is 2461356.0.

• Modified Julian Date: MJD = JD − 2400000.5, a smaller number that starts at midnight; used for modern scientific data.
• J2000.0: the reference epoch, Julian date 2451545.0 TT, which is January 1, 2000 at 12h Terrestrial Time, or 11:58:55.816 UTC (USNO).
• Time scale: the Julian Day counts in Universal Time; the live value above uses UTC, which stays within 0.9 seconds of it (NIST).

Spreadsheets count days too, from a different starting point: in Excel’s default date system January 1, 1900 is serial number 1 (Microsoft). The day of the year of a date in A1 is =A1-DATE(YEAR(A1),1,0), and the YYDDD code is =TEXT(A1,"yy")&TEXT(A1-DATE(YEAR(A1),1,0),"000"); DATE with day 0 gives the last day of the previous month (Microsoft).

Questions about Julian dates

The leap year page explains why some years have day 366, and the day of the week calculator covers dates in the Julian calendar itself.

More date and time tools

• Today’s date The date and day where you are, in every format
• What time is it Exact time, UTC offset and daylight saving time
• Days from today Count days, weeks or months forward or back
• Days between dates Days, weeks, months and business days
• Day of the week The weekday of any date, and how to work it out
• Week number ISO 8601 and US week numbers for any year
• Calendar Printable year calendar with week numbers
• Time zone converter Convert a time between any two zones
• Leap year The leap year rule, next leap year, leap seconds
• Date formats How to write the date, by country and use