Age Calculator

Age as on the cut-off date, not today

Every exam notification in India fixes a date and asks how old you are on that day. UPSC Civil Services uses 1 August of the exam year. SBI PO uses 1 April. IBPS and SSC set a date in each notification, sometimes 1 January, sometimes 1 August, and it changes between years. Nobody asks how old you are today, and getting the date wrong by a few months is how a candidate born in July finds out they were never eligible after paying the fee.

So the second field matters more than the first. Enter the date of birth exactly as it appears on your Class 10 certificate (more on why below), then put the cut-off date from the notification into “age as on”. Leave it blank and the tool uses today, which is fine for a senior citizen FD or a birthday and wrong for an exam form.

Age is counted by the calendar, not by dividing days by 365. You turn a year older on the anniversary of your birth, so the tool:

years  = cut-off year - birth year, minus 1 if the birthday has not yet come
months = whole months since the last birthday
days   = leftover days, borrowing the real length of the previous month

Someone born on 2 August 1994 is 31 years, 11 months and 30 days old on 1 August 2026. Someone born one day earlier, on 1 August 1994, is exactly 32. UPSC’s rule for a general candidate is “must not have attained 32 years” on 1 August, so the first person can sit the 2026 prelims and the second cannot. That is why the notification says “born not earlier than 2 August 1994” rather than quoting an age, and why a day matters here in a way it does nowhere else.

What the tool shows for the default date of birth

The default is a date of birth of 15 June 1990 with “age as on” left blank. On 24 September 2026, the day this page was checked, that gives:

Exact age	36 years, 3 months, 9 days
Age in years	36
Days lived	13,250
Months lived	435
Next birthday in	264 days

June comes before September, so the birthday has passed and the years figure is a plain 2026 minus 1990. Three whole months take you from 15 June to 15 September, and nine more days reach the 24th.

Change “age as on” to 1 August 2026 and the same person is 36 years, 1 month and 17 days: 13,196 days lived, next birthday in 318 days. Over the general UPSC limit by four years, inside the SC/ST limit by one.

The days-lived figure runs from the actual birth date, so it is exact even for a 29 February birth. In a common year the tool treats 28 February as the birthday, which is what most institutions do, and moves the next birthday to 1 March. A leap-day candidate born on 29 February 1996 should check which convention the exam body applies, because the two disagree on exactly one day of the year and that day could be the cut-off.

Relaxation for OBC, SC and ST candidates

The upper age limit moves with category. For UPSC Civil Services the general limit is 32 on 1 August; OBC (non-creamy layer) candidates get 3 years more, so 35; SC and ST candidates get 5 years more, so 37. The same 3 and 5 year pattern runs through SSC, the state PSCs and the banking exams, though the base limits differ: IBPS PO is 20 to 30, SSC CGL is 18 to 32 depending on the post, and most state PSCs sit somewhere between 35 and 40 for the general category with their own relaxation for domicile candidates.

Two things people get wrong. The relaxation is on the upper limit only; a 19-year-old OBC candidate is still under the 21 minimum for UPSC. And the category has to be valid on the same cut-off date: an OBC certificate whose non-creamy-layer status lapsed in the financial year before the exam does not give you the 3 years, and the form will be rejected at the document verification stage, not before you sit the paper.

Other relaxations exist (persons with benchmark disability get 10 years, ex-servicemen 5, and some states add years for women or for departmental candidates). Check the notification for the exam you are actually taking. The tool gives you the age; the notification tells you what to compare it to.

School admission, the senior citizen rate and retirement

The same “as on a date” logic shows up at both ends of life.

Class 1 and nursery. The NEP says six-plus for Class 1 and the states have been implementing it at different speeds. Delhi private schools count nursery age as on 31 March; Karnataka uses 1 June for Class 1; Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu have their own dates. A child born in May can be eligible in one state and a year too young in the next, which is a real problem for families transferred mid-year. Put the school’s cut-off date in the second field and read the years figure.

Senior citizen at 60. Banks pay an extra 0.25 to 0.50 percent on fixed deposits from the day you turn 60 (SBI adds 0.50), and the FD calculator will show what that is worth on a ₹10 lakh deposit. For FY 2025-26 the TDS threshold on bank interest for senior citizens is ₹1 lakh a year, up from ₹50,000, and Section 80TTB allows a ₹50,000 deduction on interest under the old regime. Being 59 years and 11 months on the FD booking date means none of that applies, and the bank will not backdate it.

Retirement. Central government and most PSU banks retire staff at 60. Many private companies use 58, and state governments vary (Kerala retires at 56, most others at 58 or 60). EPS pension starts at 58 regardless of when the employer let you go. Gratuity is computed on completed years of service rather than age, and the gratuity calculator does that count; this tool tells you how many years you have until the retirement date in your appointment letter.

When Aadhaar and the birth certificate disagree

A large number of Aadhaar cards carry 1 January as the date of birth. Early enrolment let people declare a year without a document, and the system filled in the first of January. Others carry a date a relative guessed at the camp. Later, the same person has a birth certificate from the municipal corporation and a Class 10 marksheet with a third date, entered by a school clerk in 2005.

For exams the answer is clear: UPSC accepts only the matriculation or secondary school certificate as proof of date of birth, and no affidavit, Aadhaar or horoscope will substitute. SSC and the banking exams follow the same line. Run the calculator on the Class 10 date, not the Aadhaar date. If they differ, fix Aadhaar (UIDAI allows a date-of-birth update with a document) before the form, because a mismatch at document verification is a rejection, not a query.

For a child born on or after 1 October 2023 the birth certificate is now the single document for date of birth under the amended Registration of Births and Deaths Act, for school admission, a passport, a driving licence and government jobs. That will make the next generation’s forms simpler. It does nothing for anyone already holding three documents with three dates.

If you need the gap between two dates that are not a birth, such as a notice period or an FD tenure, the date difference calculator counts days and working days and lets you choose whether the end date is included.