Free tool
Type any year to see instantly whether it is a leap year, when the next and previous leap years fall, what day February 29 lands on, and how many leap years sit between any two years. The Gregorian rule is built in, century exceptions and all.
Enter any year from 1582 to 4000.
No, 2026 is not a leap year
2026 is not divisible by 4, so it is NOT a leap year, February has the usual 28 days.
Count leap years in a range
How many leap years fall between two years (inclusive).
5 leap years between 2026 and 2046 (21 years, about one every 4.20 years).
Earth does not orbit the Sun in a tidy 365 days. One trip around takes roughly 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 45 seconds, about 365.2422 days, the mean tropical year. If the calendar ignored that leftover quarter-day, the seasons would drift: after a century the calendar would be roughly 24 days out of step with the solstices and equinoxes, and after a few hundred years your "December" would land in autumn. The leap day exists to absorb that drift.
The Gregorian fix, in place since 1582, has three layers. First, add a day (February 29) every year divisible by 4. That overcorrects, treating the year as exactly 365.25 days. Second, skip the leap day in century years, 1700, 1800, 1900, which are divisible by 100 but represent the overcorrection accumulating. Third, restore the leap day in century years divisible by 400-1600, 2000, 2400, because the skip itself slightly overshoots. The net effect is an average year of 365.2425 days, within half a minute of the true tropical year. That tiny remaining error only adds up to one extra day after roughly 3,200 years, which is a problem for our distant descendants, not for us.
This is the catch that trips people up. Both 1900 and 2000 are divisible by 4, so the simple rule says "leap." Both are also divisible by 100, the century exception, which says "not leap." The tiebreaker is divisibility by 400: 2000 ÷ 400 is a whole number, so the exception is overridden and 2000 was a leap year; 1900 ÷ 400 is not, so 1900 stayed a common 365-day year. The next century year to be skipped is 2100, then 2200 and 2300, with 2400 restored as a leap year. Most software that got the year-2000 rollover wrong did so precisely because it implemented only the "divisible by 4" layer and forgot the 400-year override.
The visible change is one date: February gains a 29th day, and the year runs 366 days instead of 365. The knock-on effects are larger than they look. Every date after February 29 shifts one weekday further forward than it would in a common year, so a leap year "uses up" two weekdays of drift instead of one. Payroll teams running on bi-weekly cycles occasionally hit a 27th pay period in a leap year. Anyone counting an age, a contract term, or a deadline in days rather than calendar dates needs to remember the extra day. If you are doing that kind of date arithmetic, the days-between calculator counts the real elapsed days for you, leap days included, and the age calculator handles February-29 birthdays correctly.
People born on February 29, leaplings or leap-year babies, have a real calendar birthday only once every four years. Most jurisdictions treat them as legally aging on March 1 in common years for the purposes of things like voting and driving, though some use February 28; the practical answer usually depends on the exact wording of local law. The odds of a February 29 birth are roughly one in 1,461 (four years of days, one of which is the leap day), so leaplings are genuinely rare. To see exactly which weekday a given February 29 falls on, or to count how far away the next one is, use the year checker above.
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