Excel MONTH Function

Summary

The Excel MONTH function returns the month portion of a date as number between 1 to 12 when given a date. You can use the MONTH function to extract a month number from a date into a cell. You can also use the MONTH function to feed a month number to another formula, like the DATE function.

Purpose

Get the month as a number (1-12) from a date

Return value

A number between 1 and 12.

Syntax

=MONTH (date)

Arguments

date - A valid date in a format Excel recognizes.

Usage notes

Date must be a valid Excel date.
Excel stores dates as serial numbers. For example, the date Jan 1, 2000 is equal to the serial number 32526 in Excel.
To check that Excel is correctly recognizing a date, you can temporarily format the date as a number.
Excel only recognizes dates after 1/1/1900.