Year Progress
How far we are through the current year, month and day in real time.
Overview
The Year Progress tool shows how far you are through the current year, month, day, and hour as a live percentage. The display ticks in real time, with progress bars filling left to right and decimal percentages climbing once per second — a calm, deterministic reminder of how much of the calendar is already behind us.
Useful for goal-setting and quarterly-objective check-ins, productivity dashboards living on a second monitor, motivation hacks for procrastinators, year-end retrospective preparation, and anyone who finds it grounding to know that today is, say, 38.4% of the way through 2026.
How it works
Year progress is computed as the elapsed fraction of the year, where the year is treated as the number of seconds between January 1 00:00 and December 31 23:59:59 — 31,536,000 seconds in a common year, 31,622,400 in a leap year. Month, day, and hour progress use the same elapsed-seconds-divided-by-total-seconds formula applied to their respective windows.
The calculation runs in the browser using Performance.now() plus the current wall clock, so the displayed percentages stay synchronised with the user's local civil time. Daylight-saving transitions shift the local clock but the underlying UTC progression of the year is unaffected, so the year-progress bar advances at a uniform rate regardless of DST.
Examples
2026-01-01 00:00:00 → Year 0.00%
2026-05-18 12:00:00 → Year 37.81%
2026-07-02 12:00:00 → Year 50.00% (mid-year)
2026-12-31 23:59:59 → Year 99.999...%
FAQ
Why does the percentage tick smoothly instead of jumping daily?
The calculation runs per-second by default, so the percentage advances by roughly 1/31,536,000 each second. It looks smooth at three or four decimal places.
Is a leap year accounted for?
Yes. In a leap year the total denominator is 31,622,400 seconds (366 × 86,400) so the same calendar date corresponds to a very slightly lower progress percentage than in a common year.
What time zone is "today" measured in?
Your local time zone, derived from the browser. Year progress is the elapsed fraction of your local civil year — a moment in late December reads 99% in Tokyo before it reads 99% in Los Angeles.
Does it count leap seconds?
No — civil time treats every day as exactly 86,400 seconds, the same convention used by Unix epoch time and almost every consumer-facing clock.
Why no week-progress bar?
Weeks are arguably the most useful unit here, but they require a choice of week-start (Monday in ISO 8601, Sunday in US conventions). Year, month, and day are unambiguous so they get the visual real estate.