Excel Formula to Convert Months into Years: The Easy Way

If you need to convert a number of months into years in Microsoft Excel, there’s a simple formula you can use. Whether you’re working with dates, analyzing data over time, or calculating durations for projects or financial purposes, knowing how to convert between months and years is an essential Excel skill. In this article, we’ll walk through the formula step-by-step and provide examples to help you master this conversion.

Why Convert Months to Years in Excel?

There are many scenarios where you might need to express a duration in terms of years rather than months:

• Financial calculations: Interest rates, investments, loans, and other financial data is often provided in terms of months, but analyzed in terms of years. For example, a 30-year mortgage is typically expressed in months (360 months), but for analysis, you may need to work with the data in years.
• Date differences: If you’re calculating the time between two dates, the result will be in days by default. To make this more human-readable, you may want to convert to months or years. For instance, saying “1,095 days” is less intuitive than “3 years.”
• Project planning: In fields like construction and software development, timelines are often mapped out in months initially. However, for high-level planning and reporting, expressing the duration in years is helpful. “Phase 1 will take 18 months” might be better expressed as “Phase 1 will take 1.5 years” in an executive summary.
• Data analysis: When working with time series data, having your figures in consistent time units like years makes the data easier to analyze and visualize. If you have data points every month for several years, converting the time scale to years can make trends more apparent.
• Salary and compensation: Annual salaries are often discussed in terms of monthly pay. To convert a monthly salary to an annual figure, you’ll need to convert months to years.

These are just a few examples. Any time you’re working with durations or time-based data, the ability to convert between different units of time is valuable.

The Formula to Convert Months to Years

The formula to convert a number of months to years in Excel is:

=ROUNDDOWN(number_of_months/12,0)

Here’s what each part of the formula means:

• ROUNDDOWN: This is an Excel function that rounds a number down to a specified number of decimal places. We want to round down so we don’t end up with partial years. For example, 18 months is 1.5 years, but we want to round this down to 1 year.
• number_of_months: This is the number of months you want to convert, or a reference to the cell containing that number. It can be a whole number (e.g., 24) or a decimal (e.g., 18.5).
• /12: Since there are 12 months in a year, we divide the number of months by 12. This gives us the equivalent number of years, but it may include decimals (e.g., 30 months / 12 = 2.5 years).
• ,0: This specifies the number of decimal places to round down to. We use 0 to round down to a whole number of years. If we wanted to include half years, we could use ,1 to round down to one decimal place.

Let’s look at a simple example. Say you have the number 30 in cell A1, representing a duration of 30 months. To convert this to years, you would use the following formula:

=ROUNDDOWN(A1/12,0)

The result would be 2, because 30 months rounded down to the nearest year is 2 years.

Examples of Converting Months to Years

Let’s walk through a few more examples to solidify your understanding of this formula.

Example 1: Simple Conversion

• Months: 18
• Formula: =ROUNDDOWN(18/12,0)
• Result: 1 year

In this straightforward example, we’re converting 18 months to years. 18 divided by 12 is 1.5, but we’re rounding down to 0 decimal places, so the result is 1 year.

Example 2: Referencing a Cell

• Months: 42 (in cell B6)
• Formula: =ROUNDDOWN(B6/12,0)
• Result: 3 years

Here, the number of months is stored in cell B6 rather than being directly included in the formula. This is useful when you’re working with a spreadsheet where the number of months might change, or where you have multiple numbers of months to convert.

Example 3: Rounding

• Months: 56
• Formula: =ROUNDDOWN(56/12,0)
• Result: 4 years

In this example, 56 months is actually 4 years and 8 months. However, because we’re rounding down to a whole number of years (0 decimal places), the result is 4 years. The additional 8 months are essentially discarded in this calculation.

Handling Partial Months

What if you have a number of months that isn’t a whole number? The formula will still work, but the result may not be what you expect.

For example, let’s say you have 18.5 months:

• Months: 18.5
• Formula: =ROUNDDOWN(18.5/12,0)
• Result: 1 year

Even though 18.5 months is more than 1.5 years, the result is rounded down to 1 year. If you want to round to the nearest year instead, you can use the ROUND function:

=ROUND(number_of_months/12,0)

Using this formula, 18.5 months would be rounded to 2 years, because 18.5 is closer to 24 (2 years) than to 12 (1 year).

Displaying Years and Months

If you want to display the result as a combination of years and months, you can use a slightly more complex formula:

=ROUNDDOWN(number_of_months/12,0) & ” years, ” & MOD(number_of_months,12) & ” months”

This formula has a few parts:

• ROUNDDOWN(number_of_months/12,0): This is the same as our original formula, calculating the number of whole years.
• &: This is the concatenation operator, used to join text strings.
• ” years, “: This is a literal text string that will be displayed between the years and months.
• MOD(number_of_months,12): The MOD function returns the remainder after a division. In this case, it calculates the remaining months after the years have been accounted for. For example, MOD(26,12) would return 2, because after dividing 26 by 12 (which gives 2 whole years), there are 2 months left over.
• ” months”: Another literal text string to display after the number of months.

So for example, if you had 30 months, the formula would display:

2 years, 6 months

This can make your results more readable and understandable, especially if you’re presenting the data to others.

Converting Years to Months

You can also go the other way and convert a number of years into months. The formula for this is even simpler:

=number_of_years * 12

For example, to convert 3 years to months:

=3 * 12

The result would be 36 months.

You can also use cell references in this formula. If the number of years was in cell A4, your formula would be:

=A4 * 12

This can be useful if you need to do this conversion multiple times for different numbers of years.

Final Thoughts

In this article, we’ve covered how to use a simple Excel formula to convert months to years. We’ve walked through the formula step-by-step, provided several examples, and also covered how to handle partial months and display the result as a combination of years and months. We’ve also shown how to convert in the other direction, from years to months.

Mastering this formula will help you work more effectively with dates, durations, and time-based data in Excel. Whether you’re working on financial analysis, project planning, data visualization, or any other task that involves time durations, being able to quickly convert between months and years is a valuable skill.

Practice with these examples and experiment with your own data to solidify your understanding. Don’t forget that you can use cell references in your formulas, which makes it easy to convert multiple values or to update your calculations if the data changes.

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Vaishvi Desai

Vaishvi Desai is the founder of Excelsamurai and a passionate Excel enthusiast with years of experience in data analysis and spreadsheet management. With a mission to help others harness the power of Excel, Vaishvi shares her expertise through concise, easy-to-follow tutorials on shortcuts, formulas, Pivot Tables, and VBA.