When Is the Next Leap Year? Leap Years Explained

The next leap year is 2028, and the next leap day is Tuesday, February 29, 2028, 515 days after Friday, October 2, 2026. After that, the leap years are 2032, 2036 and 2040.

The last leap year was 2024, so 2025, 2026 and 2027 are all common years of 365 days. This guide lists the leap days through 2048, explains the Gregorian rule that decides which years get a February 29 (including the century exception that will skip 2100), tells the short history behind it and covers what a leap year changes in birthdays, date counts and spreadsheets.

When is the next leap year? Leap days to 2048

Notice the weekday steps back by two places each time (Tuesday, Sunday, Friday, Wednesday, Monday, Saturday). Four years hold 1,461 days, which is 208 weeks and 5 days, so each leap day lands five weekdays later, the same as two weekdays earlier. Follow the countdown on the days until leap day page, or check any single year with the leap year checker.

The leap year rule

The Gregorian calendar, which the US and most of the world use, decides leap years in three steps:

1. A year divisible by 4 is a leap year (2024, 2028, 2032).
2. Except a year divisible by 100, which is not a leap year (1900, 2100, 2200).
3. Except a year divisible by 400, which is a leap year after all (1600, 2000, 2400).

So 2000 had a February 29 and 1900 didn’t. The next century year, 2100, won’t: after February 29, 2096, the next leap day is in 2104, an eight-year gap. Anyone alive in 2100 will see the first skipped leap year since 1900.

The rule gives 97 leap years in every 400 years. That cycle has 146,097 days, an average of 365.2425 days a year.

Why we have leap years

The calendar is trying to keep pace with the seasons, and the seasons follow the solar (tropical) year, about 365.2422 days long. A 365-day calendar falls behind by almost a quarter of a day each year, so without a correction the March equinox would drift by about a day every four years and keep going.

Julius Caesar’s calendar, introduced in 46 BC, added a leap day every fourth year without exception. That averages 365.25 days, about 11 minutes too long a year, and over the centuries the error added up. By the 1500s the spring equinox had slipped to around March 10.

Pope Gregory XIII fixed it in 1582. Ten days were dropped, so Thursday, October 4, 1582 was followed by Friday, October 15, and the century rule was added to stop the drift coming back. The Royal Observatory of Belgium notes that the Gregorian year drifts from the solar year by only about one day in 3,000 years.

Not every country switched at once. Britain and its American colonies changed in 1752, by which point they had to skip 11 days: September 2, 1752 was followed by September 14, and New Year’s Day moved from March 25 to January 1. Royal Museums Greenwich has a short history of the change.

Leap day birthdays

February 29 comes around 97 times every 146,097 days, so if births were spread evenly through the calendar, about 1 in 1,506 people would be born on a leap day. A child born on February 29, 2000 had real birthdays in 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024, and will have the seventh on February 29, 2028, at age 28.

In common years, most leap-day babies celebrate on February 28 or March 1; families pick whichever feels right. For legal purposes such as a driver’s license or turning 18 or 21, the date that counts depends on the jurisdiction and the agency, so check the rule that applies to you rather than assuming. Our age calculator for people born in 2000 shows exact ages in years, months and days.

What a leap year changes

• Day counts: any span that crosses February 29 is a day longer. From January 1 to March 1 is 59 days in 2027 but 60 days in 2028. Use the date duration calculator rather than counting months by hand.
• Day of the year: from March 1 onward, every date has a day-of-year number one higher than in a common year. February 29, 2028 is day 60, and December 31, 2028 is day 366.
• Weekdays: the year after a leap year starts two weekdays later instead of one: 2028 starts on a Saturday and 2029 on a Monday. That’s why the weekday trick in our day of the week guide treats January and February of leap years differently.
• Spreadsheets: Excel deliberately treats 1900 as a leap year, a choice Microsoft kept for compatibility with Lotus 1-2-3. According to Microsoft, the only effect today is that WEEKDAY returns wrong results for dates before March 1, 1900. Every other leap year, including 2100, is handled correctly.

Checking a leap year in a formula

If you need to test years in a spreadsheet or a script, write the three-step rule directly. In Excel or Google Sheets, with the year in A1:

• =IF(OR(MOD(A1,400)=0,AND(MOD(A1,4)=0,MOD(A1,100)<>0)),"Leap","Common")
• A shorter Excel check: =DAY(DATE(A1,3,0))=29. Day 0 of March counts back to the last day of February, so the result is TRUE only when February has 29 days. Because of the 1900 quirk above, it wrongly returns TRUE for 1900.

Avoid the shortcut “divisible by 4” on its own. It works for every year from 1901 to 2099, which is why it’s so common, but it breaks in 2100.

To see the whole year laid out with its extra day, print the 2028 calendar.

Frequently asked questions

Is 2026 a leap year?

No. 2026 isn’t divisible by 4, so it has 365 days and no February 29. Neither does 2027. The next leap year is 2028.

Is 2100 a leap year?

No. 2100 is divisible by 100 but not by 400, so it’s a common year. The next century leap year after 2000 is 2400.

How often is there a leap year?

Every four years, with three exceptions every 400 years: century years not divisible by 400 skip it. That leaves 97 leap years in each 400-year cycle.

What day of the week is February 29, 2028?

Tuesday. It’s the 60th day of 2028, a year of 366 days.

When was the last leap year?

2024. Its leap day, February 29, 2024, was a Thursday. The one before that was 2020.