How can I use Excel to find the first Monday of each month?

Excel is a powerful spreadsheet program that can be used to efficiently organize and analyze data. One useful feature of Excel is its ability to find specific dates, such as the first Monday of each month. By utilizing the DATE and WEEKDAY functions, users can easily create a formula that will automatically identify and display the first Monday of every month. This can save time and effort when working with large amounts of data, making Excel an invaluable tool for managing schedules and appointments.

Excel: Find the First Monday of Each Month


You can use the following formula in Excel to find the first Monday of a given month:

=DATE(YEAR(A2),MONTH(A2),7)-WEEKDAY(DATE(YEAR(A2),MONTH(A2),7),3)

This particular example returns the first Monday of the month for the date in cell A2.

The following example shows how to use this formula in practice.

Example: Find First Monday of Month in Excel

Suppose we have the following list of dates in Excel:

We can type the following formula into cell B2 to find the first Monday of the month for the date in cell A2:

=DATE(YEAR(A2),MONTH(A2),7)-WEEKDAY(DATE(YEAR(A2),MONTH(A2),7),3)

We can then click and drag this formula down to each remaining cell in column B

Excel find first Monday of month

Column B now contains the date of the first Monday of each month in column A.

For example, the first date of 1/1/2023 contains the month of January for 2023.

We can confirm that 1/2/2023 is indeed the first Monday of this month by referring to a calendar:

Similarly, the second date of 2/1/2023 contains the month of February for 2023.

We can confirm that 2/6/2023 is indeed the first Monday of this month by referring to a calendar:

How This Formula Works

Recall the formula that we used to find the first Monday of the date 1/1/2023:

=DATE(YEAR(A2),MONTH(A2),7)-WEEKDAY(DATE(YEAR(A2),MONTH(A2),7),3)

Here is how this formula works:

First, we use the DATE, MONTH and YEAR functions to extract the seventh day of the month and year in cell A2. This returns 1/7/2023.

Next, we use the WEEKDAY function with the optional argument of 3 to specify that we would like to extract the number of the day of the week of 1/7/2023, assuming that the days are number from 0 (Monday) to 6 (Sunday).

This returns 5 since 1/7/2023 is on a Saturday.

Lastly, we use a subtraction sign to subtract 5 from 1/7/2023 to get 1/2/2023.

We use the same logic to find the first Monday of each date.

Note: You can find the complete documentation for the WEEKDAY function in Excel .

Additional Resources

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Excel:

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