I need to get the number of days contained within a couple of dates on MySQL.

For example:

• Check in date is 12-04-2010
• Check out date 15-04-2010

The day difference would be 3.

8 Answers

What about the DATEDIFF function ?

Quoting the manual's page :

DATEDIFF() returns expr1 – expr2 expressed as a value in days from one date to the other. expr1 and expr2 are date or date-and-time expressions. Only the date parts of the values are used in the calculation

In your case, you'd use :

mysql> select datediff('2010-04-15', '2010-04-12');
+--------------------------------------+
| datediff('2010-04-15', '2010-04-12') |
+--------------------------------------+
| 3 |
+--------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0,00 sec)

But note the dates should be written as YYYY-MM-DD, and not DD-MM-YYYY like you posted.

3

Note if you want to count FULL 24h days between 2 dates, datediff can return wrong values for you.

As documentation states:

Only the date parts of the values are used in the calculation.

which results in

select datediff('2016-04-14 11:59:00', '2016-04-13 12:00:00')

returns 1 instead of expected 0.

Solution is using select timestampdiff(DAY, '2016-04-13 11:00:01', '2016-04-14 11:00:00');(note the opposite order of arguments compared to datediff).

Some examples:

• select timestampdiff(DAY, '2016-04-13 11:00:01', '2016-04-14 11:00:00');returns 0
• select timestampdiff(DAY, '2016-04-13 11:00:00', '2016-04-14 11:00:00');returns 1
• select timestampdiff(DAY, '2016-04-13 11:00:00', now()); returns how many full 24h days has passed since 2016-04-13 11:00:00 until now.

Hope it will help someone, because at first it isn't much obvious why datediff returns values which seems to be unexpected or wrong.

2

Use the DATEDIFF() function.

Example from documentation:

SELECT DATEDIFF('2007-12-31 23:59:59','2007-12-30'); -> 1

I prefer TIMESTAMPDIFF because you can easily change the unit if need be.

Get days between Current date to destination Date

 SELECT DATEDIFF('2019-04-12', CURDATE()) AS days;

output

days

 335

SELECT md.*, DATEDIFF(md.end_date, md.start_date) AS days FROM membership_dates md

output::

id entity_id start_date end_date days
1 1236 2018-01-16 00:00:00 2018-08-31 00:00:00 227
2 2876 2015-06-26 00:00:00 2019-06-30 00:00:00 1465
3 3880 1990-06-05 00:00:00 2018-07-04 00:00:00 10256
4 3882 1993-07-05 00:00:00 2018-07-04 00:00:00 9130

If you want a more accurate value than just the rounded up number of days:

select timestampdiff(minute, min(date_col), max(date_col))/1440 from table

 TIMESTAMPDIFF(DAY,STR_TO_DATE(date_format('2018-01-01', '%d-%m-%YYYY'),'%d-%m-%YYYY'), '2020-01-01') TOTAL_DAYS

TOTAL_DAYS: 730 days