How to add months to a date
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 ✓ Verified in Google Sheets (2026-08-30)Shift a date forward (or back) by whole months, e.g. for renewals, billing cycles, or due dates.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel (desktop) | =EDATE(A2,3) | Use a negative number to go back. Format the result cell as a date. |
| Google Sheets | =EDATE(A2,3) | Identical. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =EDATE(A2,3) | Identical. |
How it works
EDATE moves a date by whole months and handles month-length edge cases for you: January 31 plus one month lands on February 28 (the last valid day), not March 3. The raw result is a date serial number, so format the cell as a date — the verification wraps it in TEXT only to make the result readable.
Verified, not just documented
We ran =TEXT(EDATE(DATE(2026,1,31),1),"YYYY-MM-DD") in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned 2026-02-28 — exactly the expected result. We then ran the same formulas in Google Sheets, executed 2026-08-30: a formula-only workbook goes into Google Drive, which converts it to a Sheet and recalculates every formula with Google’s own engine, and comes back out as .xlsx carrying the values Google computed. It returned 2026-02-28 for the worked example, the same value LibreOffice produced. Both engines’ numbers on this page are executed results. The Excel formula follows Microsoft’s official documented syntax — we do not run desktop Excel.
Functions used
EDATE — see full Excel, Google Sheets & LibreOffice compatibility for each.