How to Subtract Days from Date in Excel

By SpreadCheaters
Page last updated: 20/02/2023 | Next review date: 20/02/2025
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Excel is a powerful tool for organizing and analyzing data, and one common task you might need to perform is subtracting a certain number of days from a date. You might need to do this when you are planning an event. For example, if your event is on June 30th and you need to order supplies two weeks in advance, you would need to subtract 14 days from the event date to get the order deadline of June 16th.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to do this using a simple formula. Here we have two types of dataset which contain Date in two different formats and also number of Days to subtract from it. Both Dates Format have a different method to perform this subtraction of days we will discuss both.

Method 1 – Subtraction of days from date if the whole date is in one column

Following dataset above having dates in the first column and days to subtract in the second column will be used for this method.

Step – 1 Type the Formula

  • Select the cell where you want to display the Final date
  • Simply subtract the “DATES(mm/dd/yyyy)” cell with the “DAYS TO SUBTRACT” cell, syntax for this formula will be:

=Date_cell – n

n is the number of days you can either directly give any value to n or you can subtract the Date_cell with the cell that contains the value of n.

  • In our case the formula will be:

=A2-B2

A2 is the cell with Date init.

B2 is the cell with Days.

  • After typing in the formula, hit enter and drag that cell from bottom right to the rest of the cells for remaining values.

Method 2 – Subtraction of days from date if Date is divided in multiple columns

Following dataset above will be used for this method, where we have the date parameters separated in different columns. So, first we’ll create a date using these parameters and then subtract days.

Step – 1 Type the Formula 

  • We used the DATE function of Excel, its syntax is

=DATE(Year, Month, Date)

  • We then subtracted n from it which is number of Days

=DATE(Year, Month, Date) – n

  • In our case Formula is

=DATE(A2,B2,C2)-D2

Step – 2 Find the Final Date for the rest of the values

  • After finding the first Date drag it from bottom right to the remaining cells.
  • Excel will produce the remaining results automatically according to the Date.