PHP: Get next year’s date.

Last week, I wrote a short guide on how to get the current year in PHP. Today, I am going to show you how to get next year’s date using PHP.

Let’s start with the following example:

//Instantiate the DateTime object.
$now = new DateTime();
 
//You can get next year's date by using the
//DateTime::add function and DateInterval
$nextYearDT = $now->add(new DateInterval('P1Y'));
 
//Retrive the date in a YYYY-MM-DD format.
$nextYear = $nextYearDT->format('Y-m-d');
 
//var_dump the result.
var_dump($nextYear);

In the PHP code above, we:

  1. Created a new DateTime object.
  2. Afterwards, we provided the DateTime::add function with a DateInterval of P1Y. If we wanted to get a date that is 5 years into the future, we would have used P5Y as the interval instead.
  3. Finally, we retrieved the date in a YYYY-MM-DD format and did a var_dump on the result.

When I ran the above piece of code on the 14th of December, 2019, the result was: 2020-12-14

Note that if just want next year without the month or the day, then you can simply omit the “m” and “d” format characters:

//Get the date in a YYYY format.
$nextYear = $nextYearDT->format('Y');

This will result in “2020” being printed out.

If you want to get next year’s date using PHP’s date and strtotime functions, then you can try the following example:

//Using date and the strtotime function
$nextYear = date("Y-m-d", strtotime("+1 year"));
var_dump($nextYear);

As you can see, we were able to pass in “+1 year” as a parameter to PHP’s strtotime function. The result of strtotime provided the date function with a Unix timestamp of next year’s date.

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