Author: Oscar Cronquist Article last updated on May 09, 2022

The TODAY function returns the Excel date (serial number) of the current date.

Warning! This function is volatile meaning it recalculates every time the workbook recalculates.

This may slow down your workbook calculations considerably if there are many formulas that depend on the TODAY function.

Excel Function Syntax

TODAY()

Arguments

The TODAY function has no arguments

Comments

The Excel date the TODAY function returns is a serial number that Excel recognizes and can be filtered, sorted and used in other date calculations.

Excel dates are actually serial numbers formatted as dates, 1/1/1900 is 1 and 2/2/2018 is 43133. There are 43132 days between 2/2/2018 and 1/1/1900.

You can try this yourself, type 10000 in a cell, press CTRL + 1 and change the cell's formatting to date, press with left mouse button on OK. The cell now shows 5/18/1927.