Experience Calculator

Adding up how long you have worked

It adds up how long you have worked. You enter each job with its start and end dates, and it returns your total professional experience as an exact number of years, months and days, along with the same figure in weeks, days and decimal years.

The part that makes it more than addition is what happens when jobs overlap. Freelancers, contractors, people who took a second role before leaving the first, and anyone who ran a side business alongside employment all have periods covered by more than one engagement. Counting those twice inflates a career by months or years, and it is the single most common way an experience figure ends up wrong.

The calculator merges overlapping spells so each calendar day counts once, shows you exactly how much overlap it found, and lets you switch to counting in full if that is genuinely what you need.

When you need a total-experience figure

Anyone filling in an application form that asks for total years of experience. Recruitment systems and government forms are unforgiving about this: they compare your stated figure against the employment history you list, and a mismatch invites a question you would rather not answer.

Job applicants writing a CV summary line, who need a defensible number rather than a rounded guess. People checking whether they meet a stated minimum — five years for a senior role, three years for a professional registration, a threshold in a visa category.

Contractors and freelancers reconciling a portfolio career made of many short, frequently concurrent engagements, where the total is genuinely hard to work out by hand.

HR teams verifying a candidate's claim against the dates on their application, and anyone preparing documentation where the total has to match the individual entries exactly.

How to use it

1. Enter your first job. Company and title are optional and only used to label the results, but they make the timeline far easier to read.
2. Add the start and end dates. For your current role, tick the current-job box and leave the end date blank — it will be disabled, since a current job runs to the calculation date.
3. Add more jobs with the button below the rows. There is no need to enter them in order; they are sorted for you.
4. Decide how to treat overlaps. Leave the box unticked unless you specifically need concurrent engagements counted separately.
5. Set the calculation date if you need experience as at some date other than today — the closing date of an application, for instance.
6. Press Calculate.

What each input means

Company and job title

Labels only. They appear in the results table, the timeline and the copied output, and they never affect the arithmetic. Leave them blank and rows are labelled "Job 1", "Job 2" and so on.

Start and end dates

The dates you actually started and finished, not the dates on the contract if those differ. Impossible dates are rejected rather than rolled over, so a mistyped 31 February produces an error rather than quietly becoming 3 March.

An end date before its start date is rejected, because it produces a negative duration that would silently reduce your total.

Current job

Ticking this measures the role up to the calculation date and disables the end date field. Disabling rather than ignoring it matters: a field holding a value that is not being used is a reliable source of confusion when the total does not match expectations.

You can tick it on more than one row if you genuinely hold several roles at once. They will overlap, and the overlap handling deals with it correctly.

Count overlapping employment in full

Off by default. See the overlap section below for when to change it.

Calculate experience as at

Defaults to today. Set it to a specific date when an application asks for experience as at a closing date, or when you are reconstructing what your experience was at some point in the past. Any job starting after that date is rejected, and current jobs stop there.

Reading the results

Total experience

The headline: exact years, months and days. Zero components are omitted, so a clean three years reads "3 years" rather than "3 years, 0 months and 0 days".

The same total in other units

Years, total months, weeks and days, plus decimal years and decimal months. Different forms suit different purposes — application forms usually want whole years, contracts often want months, and a CV summary line reads better with one decimal place.

Career summary

The number of jobs, your total career span from first start to last end, the longest and shortest spells, and — importantly — the overlapping period and the non-overlapping total shown side by side.

Career span is not the same as total experience. Span includes any time you were not working; experience does not. When the two differ, the difference is your time out of employment.

Job by job

Every spell with its own duration, sorted earliest first. Use it to check that each entry is what you meant before trusting the total.

Experience timeline

Each job as a proportional bar across your career span. Overlaps appear as bars sharing the same horizontal range; gaps appear as stretches where no bar is present. It is the fastest way to spot a mistyped year, which usually shows up as one bar in the wrong place entirely.

Resume-ready wording

Three phrasings of the same total, each with its own copy button. One is exact, one is decimal, and one is the rounded "over N years" form that suits a CV summary.

How the calculation works

The calculation runs in four steps.

The total shown is the net figure by default, or the gross figure if you asked for overlaps in full. That day count is then laid onto the calendar starting from your earliest start date to produce the years, months and days breakdown.

That last step deserves an explanation. Non-contiguous spells cannot simply be concatenated on a calendar, because a month is not a fixed length — three separate "one month" spells could be 28, 30 and 31 days. Anchoring the day total at a real date gives a years-months-days figure that is consistent with the day count displayed beside it, which matters because those two numbers appear together and must not contradict each other.

All arithmetic runs in UTC, so a daylight-saving change cannot shift a result by an hour and alter a day count at a boundary.

The overlap problem

This is the concept the calculator exists to get right, so it is worth understanding properly.

Suppose you worked at one company from January 2020 to December 2022, and took a second role from July 2022 to June 2023. Added naively that is three years plus one year, or four years of experience. But the calendar disagrees: you started working in January 2020 and stopped in June 2023, which is three and a half years. The six months where both roles ran concurrently were counted twice.

The calculator merges the two spells into one continuous run from January 2020 to June 2023 and reports three years and six months, while telling you separately that roughly six months of overlap was found.

When to count overlaps once

Almost always. Anything describing how long you have been working — CVs, application forms, eligibility thresholds, professional registration, visa categories — means elapsed time. Nobody gains two years of seniority in one calendar year by holding two jobs.

When to count them in full

When you are totalling engagement time rather than elapsed time. A contractor totalling billable months across concurrent clients, someone reporting cumulative project duration, or a form explicitly asking for the sum of all engagements. These are real cases, which is why the option exists — but they are the exception, and the calculator states which basis it used in the result.

Touching spells

Intervals are treated as half-open, meaning a spell that ends on the same day another begins is continuous rather than overlapping. If you left one job on 30 June and started the next on 1 July, that is one unbroken run with no double-counted day and no gap.

Worked example: a straightforward career

Worked example: overlapping contracts

Worked example: a gap between jobs

Decimal years and why it differs

The decimal figure is the real day count divided by 365.2425, the average length of a Gregorian year once the leap-year rules are accounted for. The years-months-days breakdown, by contrast, is exact calendar arithmetic.

These are two correct descriptions of the same interval and they will not always agree to the digit. Ten years and two months is 10.17 years if you divide months by twelve, but 10.20 by day count, because the particular months involved were longer than average. Neither is wrong; they measure differently.

Use the calendar breakdown when precision matters — an application form asking for years and months. Use the decimal when a single number is wanted, and quote it to one or two decimal places rather than implying precision that the underlying dates do not support.

Start and end dates, and the day in between

A subtle question with real consequences: if you start on 1 January and leave on 31 January, is that 30 days or 31?

This calculator treats each spell as a half-open interval — the start date is included, the end date is the boundary. So 1 January to 31 January is 30 days. The reason is consistency across adjacent spells: if you leave one job on 30 June and start another on 1 July, half-open intervals give one continuous run with every day counted exactly once. Counting both endpoints would count 30 June twice.

Some payroll systems count inclusively and would call the same spell 31 days. The difference is one day per job, which is immaterial in a multi-year total but can matter if you are reconciling against a system that counts the other way. The calculation panel shows the day count for each spell so you can see exactly what was used.

Writing experience on a CV

The exact figure is for forms. A CV usually reads better rounded, and the calculator gives you all three forms so you can pick.

Round down, never up. If the calculator says 4 years and 11 months, write "over 4 years" rather than "5 years". The difference is trivial to you and material if a recruiter checks it against your dates.

Keep the summary consistent with the dates below it. The most common CV inconsistency is a headline claiming more years than the employment history supports, usually because overlapping roles were added together.

Be ready to explain gaps. The span figure tells you what a reader will see. A gap is not a problem in itself; being unable to account for it is.

Say what kind of experience it is. "Over 6 years of professional experience" is stronger and more honest than a bare "6 years", particularly if some of it was part-time or an internship. To separate those out, use the work experience calculator, which splits experience by type.

Notice periods, garden leave and probation

These three regularly cause an experience figure to be a month or two out, because it is not obvious which date to use.

Notice periods and garden leave. Your employment continues until your termination date, even if you stopped attending weeks earlier. Use the date your contract ended, not your last day in the office. That is the date on your reference and your P45 or equivalent, so it is the date that will be checked. Garden leave is employment: you are paid, you remain bound by your contract, and it counts.

Probation. A probationary period is part of your employment from day one. It is not a trial that starts counting once passed. Use your actual start date, including any probation, unless a specific rule says otherwise — some professional registrations do exclude it, which is a rule to check rather than to assume.

Offer dates versus start dates. Use the day you started work. The date you accepted the offer is not employment.

Contract start before the first working day. Where a contract begins on a Monday but the first working day is the Wednesday after a public holiday, use the contract date. Employment records run on contract dates, and consistency with those records is what matters when your history is verified.

When your records disagree

It is common for a CV, a payslip, a reference and your own memory to give slightly different dates for the same job. Before deciding your total is wrong, work out which source an assessor would use.

Payroll and tax records are the strongest evidence, because they are contemporaneous and issued by a third party. Reference letters come next, then contracts, then your own CV. If your calculated total does not match a figure someone else has produced, the difference almost always traces back to one role where two sources disagree.

The job-by-job table makes this quick to isolate. Compare each spell against your records one at a time rather than re-checking the total, and the discrepancy will usually be a single date typed with the wrong year or month.

Where sources genuinely conflict and it matters, use the more conservative date. Claiming the earlier start date buys you a few weeks and costs you the ability to evidence it.

Common scenarios

Contractors with concurrent clients

Enter each engagement separately, including those that ran at the same time. The merged total is your elapsed experience; the overlap figure tells you how much concurrent work you did, which is worth knowing but is not additional career length.

Promotions within one company

If you want the total, enter one row from your start date to now. If you want each title to appear on the timeline, enter them as consecutive rows — they touch, so they merge into one continuous run and the total is identical.

Applications with a closing date

Set the calculation date to the closing date rather than today. Experience keeps accruing, and an application assessed against a fixed date should be calculated against it.

Checking a minimum requirement

Calculate as at the relevant date and compare. If you are close to a threshold, the day count matters — and if you need a formal eligible-or-not answer, the work experience calculator performs that comparison directly.

Career breaks

Simply omit them; they are not jobs. The gap will appear in the timeline and in the difference between your total and your span.

Part-time and full-time together

This calculator measures elapsed time regardless of hours. If you need part-time experience weighted or reported separately, that is what the work experience calculator is for.

Common mistakes

Tips

Limitations

Frequently asked questions