How do I add x days to a date in Java?

For example, my date is 01/01/2012, using dd/mm/yyyy as the format.

Adding 5 days, the output should be 06/01/2012.

6 Answers

SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy"); Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance(); c.setTime(new Date()); // Using today's date c.add(Calendar.DATE, 5); // Adding 5 days String output = sdf.format(c.getTime()); System.out.println(output); 

java.time

With the Java 8 Date and Time API you can use the LocalDate class.

LocalDate.now().plusDays(nrOfDays) 

See the Oracle Tutorial.

Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance(); cal.set(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, 1); cal.set(Calendar.MONTH, 1); cal.set(Calendar.YEAR, 2012); cal.add(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, 5); 

You can also subtract days like this: Calendar.add(Calendar.DAY_OF_MONTH, -5);

Here is some simple code that prints the date five days from now:

DateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy"); Calendar c = Calendar.getInstance(); c.add(Calendar.DATE, 5); System.out.println(dateFormat.format(c.getTime())); 

Example output:

16/12/2021 

See also: Calendar#add

If you're using Joda-Time (and there are lots of good reasons to - a simple, intuitive API and thread safety) then you can do this trivially:

new LocalDate().plusDays(5); 

to add 5 days to today's date, for example.

EDIT: My current advice would be to now use the Java 8 date/time API

Simple, without any other API:

To add 8 days to the current day:

Date today = new Date(); long ltime = today.getTime()+8*24*60*60*1000; Date today8 = new Date(ltime);