Add hours to a date and time using PHP.

This is a tutorial on how to add hours to a date and time using PHP.

In this guide, we will provide examples using both the regular date and time functions, as well as PHP’s DateTime object.

Adding hours onto a date and time using PHP’s date and time functions.

Take a look at the following example, which is intentionally verbose:

//Get the current time in Unix.
$currentTime = time();

//The amount of hours that you want to add.
$hoursToAdd = 2;

//Convert the hours into seconds.
$secondsToAdd = $hoursToAdd * (60 * 60);

//Add the seconds onto the current Unix timestamp.
$newTime = $currentTime + $secondsToAdd;

//Print it out in a format that suits you.
echo date("d/m/y H:i", $newTime), '<br>';

//Or try this.
echo    "$hoursToAdd hour(s) added onto " .
        date("d/m/y H:i", $currentTime) . " becomes " .
        date("d/m/y H:i", $newTime);

In the PHP code above, we:

  • Got the current Unix timestamp using PHP’s time function.
  • Defined a variable called $hoursToAdd, which contains the number of hours that we want to add onto our date and time. In this case, we will be adding 2 hours to the current time. If we wanted to add 12 hours to the current time, then we would simply change this variable to 12.
  • We then converted our hours into seconds by multiplying the number of hours by 3600 (60 x 60 = 3600). This works because there are 3600 seconds in one hour. In the case above, 2 is multiplied by 3600, which gives us 7200. This is correct, as there are 7200 seconds in two hours.
  • We then added these seconds onto the current timestamp.
  • Finally, we printed out the new date and time using PHP’s date function.

When I ran the code above, I received the following result:

2 hour(s) added onto 03/01/20 14:10 becomes 03/01/20 16:10

Perfect!

Adding hours onto a date and time using PHP’s DateTime object.

If you want to use the DateTime object for this operation, then you can use the following example:

//Get the current date and time.
$current = new DateTime();

//The number of hours to add.
$hoursToAdd = 2;

//Add the hours by using the DateTime::add method in
//conjunction with the DateInterval object.
$current->add(new DateInterval("PT{$hoursToAdd}H"));

//Format the new time into a more human-friendly format
//and print it out.
$newTime = $current->format('Y-m-d H:i');
echo $newTime;

As you can see, you do not need to do any multiplication sums while using the DateTime object, as it comes equipped with a handy method called DateTime::add.

In the code above, we simply passed a DateInterval object into this method. Our DateInterval object had PT2H set as the $interval_spec parameter, which basically translates into “a period of two hours.”

Other examples of what you could pass into the constructor of the DateInterval object:

  • PT1H: A period of one hour.
  • PT6H: A period of six hours.
  • PT24H: A period of 24 hours.

The most important thing in this case is that we use the letter “H” as the Period Designator.

Related tutorials: