Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: Calculating Months of Tenure.

Calculating Months of Tenure

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated January 8, 2022)
This tip applies to Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003


If you are in charge of tracking employees in your department or company, you might want to know if you can use Excel to calculate the months of tenure for those employees, given the date at which the employee started. This can be done very easily.

For the sake of this example, let's assume that column C contains the starting date for a list of employees. You could use the following formula in column D to determine each employee's tenure:

=DATEDIF(C3,NOW(),"M")

The DATEDIF function calculates the difference between a starting date and an ending date. The "M" used in the formula indicates that you want the result in completed months.

To calculate the average tenure for your series of employees, simply include the following formula at the bottom of column C:

=AVERAGE(C3:C174)

Of course, you should replace the range in the function (C3:C174) with the actual range of employee tenures as determined by the DATEDIF formula.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2595) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Calculating Months of Tenure.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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