Difference in two Dates in PHP

In PHP to calculate the difference in two dates we have to use mktime function and then find out the difference in seconds. Then this difference in seconds is to be converted in to required month, days or year differences. We will try to learn a general way of identification and then format it accordingly.

We will take the two dates with hour, minutes and seconds. If the hour minute and second is not important then we can keep the values as 0. Once both the time stamps are calculated then the difference in seconds are fund out by subtracting the two. For other differences we have to divide the difference in second in different values and taking the floor math value of it.
date difference using date object

To get the difference in minutes we have to divide by 60
To get the difference in hours we have to divide by 3600 ( 60 minute x 60 seconds )
To get the difference tin days we have to divide by 86400 ( 24 x 60 x 60 )
To get the difference in months we have to divide by 2628000

Here is the code to do that.

$d1=mktime(22,0,0,1,1,2007);
$d2=mktime(0,0,0,1,2,2007);
echo "Hours difference = ".floor(($d2-$d1)/3600) . "<br>";
echo "Minutes difference = ".floor(($d2-$d1)/60) . "<br>";
echo "Seconds difference = " .($d2-$d1). "<br>";

echo "Month difference = ".floor(($d2-$d1)/2628000) . "<br>";
echo "Days difference = ".floor(($d2-$d1)/86400) . "<br>";
echo "Year difference = ".floor(($d2-$d1)/31536000) . "<br>";

mktime() : create the timestamp using date and time

PHP Date Functions Generate Timestamp using date and time

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel here

Sashi	20-03-2010
Thanks for providing this simple and efficient date difference check functionality. It works !

Sadart Abukari	09-07-2011
Great article for all my data manipulation needs. Implemented it with sessions using explode() to turn time stored in session as string and passed it to call_user_func_array with mktime and the exploded array as parameters. Thanks a bunch.

sriram	25-07-2014
nice code

Riddhish	09-04-2015
Really Helpfull

PHP Date Difference calculation using mktime function

Subscribe