n8n Date and Time Node: Complete Guide to Working with Dates

Working with dates and times in automation is deceptively tricky. Different APIs return dates in different formats, time zones cause unexpected behavior, and calculating intervals or formatting timestamps for display requires logic that gets messy fast in code. The n8n Date & Time node exists to handle all of this cleanly — without requiring you to write JavaScript date manipulation logic every time you need to compare, format, or transform a timestamp.

In this guide we walk through everything the Date & Time node can do — parsing, formatting, calculating differences, adding and subtracting time, converting time zones, and the practical workflow patterns where it makes your automations dramatically simpler.

What the Date & Time Node Does

The Date & Time node is a transformation node — it takes a date or timestamp from the current item and applies an operation to it, outputting the result as a new or updated field. It supports several distinct operations: Calculate a Date (add or subtract time from a date), Format a Date (convert between representations), Get Current Date (inject the current timestamp), Round a Date (floor or ceil to the nearest unit), and Extract Part of a Date (pull out just the year, month, day, hour, etc.).

Each operation takes a date input — either from an item field or a manually entered value — applies your configured transformation, and outputs the result. The output can replace the original field, add a new field, or be used in an expression by subsequent nodes. This covers the vast majority of date manipulation needs in real workflows without any custom code.

Get Current Date

The simplest operation is Get Current Date — it outputs the current timestamp at the moment the node executes. You can specify the output format (ISO 8601, Unix timestamp, or a custom Luxon format string) and optionally include the time component or return just the date portion. You can also specify the time zone, so instead of always getting UTC, you can get the current time in your local zone or any other zone you specify.

Use Get Current Date to stamp records with a created-at or processed-at timestamp, to calculate relative dates (combine it with Calculate a Date to find “now minus 7 days”), or to generate date-based folder names or file names in workflows that archive content by date.

Format a Date

Format a Date converts a date from one representation to another. Specify the input field containing the date, tell the node what format the input is in (ISO 8601, Unix timestamp in seconds or milliseconds, or a custom format), and then specify the desired output format using a Luxon format string. Common output formats include yyyy-MM-dd for a plain date, dd/MM/yyyy for European style, MMMM d, yyyy for a written-out date like “March 15, 2026”, or h:mm a for a 12-hour time.

This operation is invaluable when APIs return dates in formats that don’t match what your destination system expects. A CRM might want MM/DD/YYYY while a database expects ISO 8601 — a single Format a Date node handles the translation cleanly. It’s also essential when building user-facing content like emails or reports where dates need to be human-readable rather than machine-formatted.

Calculate a Date

Calculate a Date adds or subtracts a specified amount of time from a date. You choose the operation (add or subtract), the amount, and the unit (minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years). This handles a huge range of scheduling and deadline calculations without any custom code.

Common uses include: calculating a due date by adding N days to a start date, finding the date 30 days ago for a lookback query, computing an expiry date from a creation timestamp, or scheduling a follow-up by adding a week to today’s date. You can chain multiple Date & Time nodes together for multi-step calculations — for example, first add 30 days then round down to the nearest week boundary — keeping each transformation explicit and easy to follow.

Extract Part of a Date

Extract Part of a Date pulls a single component out of a full timestamp — just the year, just the month number, just the day of the week, just the hour, and so on. This is useful when you need to make decisions or group data based on a date component without carrying the full timestamp.

For example: extract the day of the week to skip processing on weekends, extract the month to group records by month in a report, extract the hour to classify events as morning/afternoon/evening, or extract the year to build a date-based folder structure. Combined with an IF node, extracted date parts let you build calendar-aware routing logic that adapts behavior based on when the workflow runs.

Time Zone Conversion

Time zone handling is one of the most common sources of bugs in automation. The Date & Time node handles this explicitly — when formatting or calculating dates, you can specify both an input time zone and an output time zone, so the node handles the conversion correctly. This prevents the common mistake of treating a UTC timestamp as local time or vice versa.

When building workflows that span multiple time zones — for example, scheduling messages to be sent at 9am in a recipient’s local time — use the Date & Time node to convert from your workflow’s UTC timestamps to the recipient’s local time before making scheduling decisions. Always store timestamps internally in UTC and convert to local time only at the point of display or delivery — this is the standard that keeps multi-timezone workflows reliable.

Practical Workflow Examples

Here are patterns where the Date & Time node is the key piece. In a scheduled report workflow: a Schedule Trigger fires daily, the Date & Time node formats today’s date as a readable string and also calculates “7 days ago” for the query window, both values get injected into a database query, and the results go into a report — all without any date code. In an SLA tracker: when a support ticket arrives, add the SLA window (say, 48 hours) to the creation timestamp to get the due date, store it on the ticket record, then a second workflow checks hourly whether any ticket is past due.

In a birthday email sender: extract the month and day from each contact’s stored birthday, compare to today’s month and day (also extracted), and route matches to an email node. In a content archiver: when saving files, use Get Current Date to generate a year/month folder path dynamically so files always land in the right dated directory. Each of these is clean, readable, and maintainable — exactly what the Date & Time node is designed to enable.