Date difference in years using C# [duplicate]

Answer 1

I implemented an extension method to get the number of years between two dates, rounded by whole months.

    /// <summary>
    /// Gets the total number of years between two dates, rounded to whole months.
    /// Examples: 
    /// 2011-12-14, 2012-12-15 returns 1.
    /// 2011-12-14, 2012-12-14 returns 1.
    /// 2011-12-14, 2012-12-13 returns 0,9167.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="start">
    /// Stardate of time period
    /// </param>
    /// <param name="end">
    /// Enddate of time period
    /// </param>
    /// <returns>
    /// Total Years between the two days
    /// </returns>
    public static double DifferenceTotalYears(this DateTime start, DateTime end)
    {
        // Get difference in total months.
        int months = ((end.Year - start.Year) * 12) + (end.Month - start.Month);

        // substract 1 month if end month is not completed
        if (end.Day < start.Day)
        {
            months--;
        }

        double totalyears = months / 12d;
        return totalyears;
    }

Answer 2

If you're dealing with months and years you need something that knows how many days each month has and which years are leap years.

Enter the Gregorian Calendar (and other culture-specific Calendar implementations).

While Calendar doesn't provide methods to directly calculate the difference between two points in time, it does have methods such as

DateTime AddWeeks(DateTime time, int weeks)
DateTime AddMonths(DateTime time, int months)
DateTime AddYears(DateTime time, int years)

Answer 3

If you need it for knowing someone's age for trivial reasons then Timespan is OK but if you need for calculating superannuation, long term deposits or anything else for financial, scientific or legal purposes then I'm afraid Timespan won't be accurate enough because Timespan assumes that every year has the same number of days, same # of hours and same # of seconds).

In reality the length of some years will vary (for different reasons that are outside the scope of this answer). To get around Timespan's limitation then you can mimic what Excel does which is:

    public int GetDifferenceInYears(DateTime startDate, DateTime endDate)
    {
        //Excel documentation says "COMPLETE calendar years in between dates"
        int years = endDate.Year - startDate.Year;

        if (startDate.Month == endDate.Month &&// if the start month and the end month are the same
            endDate.Day < startDate.Day// AND the end day is less than the start day
            || endDate.Month < startDate.Month)// OR if the end month is less than the start month
        {
            years--;
        }

        return years;
    }

Answer 4

var totalYears = 
    (DateTime.Today - new DateTime(2007, 03, 11)).TotalDays
    / 365.2425;

Average days from Wikipedia/Leap_year.

Answer 5

Simple solution:

public int getYearDiff(DateTime startDate, DateTime endDate){
    int y = Year(endDate) - Year(startDate);
    int startMonth = Month(startDate);
    int endMonth = Month(endDate);
    if (endMonth < startMonth) 
        return y - 1;
    if (endMonth > startMonth) 
        return y;
    return (Day(endDate) < Day(startDate) ? y - 1 : y);
}

Answer 6

It's unclear how you want to handle fractional years, but perhaps like this:

DateTime now = DateTime.Now;
DateTime origin = new DateTime(2007, 11, 3);
int calendar_years = now.Year - origin.Year;
int whole_years = calendar_years - ((now.AddYears(-calendar_years) >= origin)? 0: 1);
int another_method = calendar_years - ((now.Month - origin.Month) * 32 >= origin.Day - now.Day)? 0: 1);