How many days until Valentine's Day?
A live countdown to the next 14 February, recalculated from today each time you open the page — useful whether you are planning months ahead or discovering the date rather late.
Live countdown
How this date is worked out
Valentine's Day is fixed on 14 February. The countdown resolves the next occurrence on or after today, so it rolls to the following year by itself on 15 February. During the day itself it shows the time remaining rather than a negative figure.
Who was Valentine?
Frustratingly, probably more than one person. Early martyrologies list at least two, and possibly three, Christian martyrs named Valentinus associated with 14 February: a priest in Rome and a bishop of Terni, both traditionally dated to the third century, and the accounts of them may well be variants of a single figure. The familiar stories — that he secretly married couples in defiance of an imperial ban, or that he signed a farewell note "from your Valentine" — are much later embellishments with no early evidence behind them.
Nothing in those accounts is romantic. The link to love appears to be literary, and traceable to a specific text: Geoffrey Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, written around 1382, which describes 14 February as the day birds choose their mates. Within a generation the association was established in courtly poetry, and by the fifteenth century people were exchanging Valentine's letters. The oldest surviving English valentine is a poem sent by Margery Brews to John Paston in 1477.
How it became a card holiday
The industrial version arrived in the nineteenth century. Cheaper printing and the Penny Post in Britain from 1840 made mass-produced cards affordable, and volumes rose sharply within a decade; in the United States, Esther Howland began producing elaborate lace valentines in the 1840s and turned it into a business. Chocolate boxes followed — Richard Cadbury's decorated boxes date from the 1860s — and jewellery, flowers and restaurant dinners were layered on through the twentieth century.
Related dates worth knowing
- 13 February is marked by some as Galentine's Day, a friendship celebration popularised by a 2010 television episode that escaped into real life.
- 14 March is White Day in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, when the recipients of gifts on 14 February reciprocate.
- 29 February carries an old British and Irish tradition that a woman may propose on leap day — a custom with a countdown of its own, since it comes round only every four years, and not in century years that are not divisible by 400.
- Singles' Day, 11 November, began as an anti-Valentine's observance among Chinese university students in the 1990s and is now the largest shopping day in the world.
The next six Valentine's Days
The weekday matters here, because a Valentine’s Day on a Saturday books out restaurants in a way a Tuesday does not:
| Year | Date | Day of the week | Days from today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calculating… | |||
Questions people ask
Is Valentine's Day always 14 February?
Yes, everywhere it is observed. Only the day of the week changes from year to year, which is what the table above is for.
Does this page need updating each year?
No. The date is computed from a rule — the next 14 February on or after today — rather than stored, so the page cannot go stale.
When should I book a restaurant?
Not advice this calculator can give with authority, but the pattern is consistent: when 14 February falls on a Friday or Saturday, popular restaurants in large cities are commonly fully booked several weeks ahead, and many run the offer across the whole weekend. Use the table above to see which years those are.
How many days until Valentine’s Day from today?
Read it off the clock at the top of the page. It is calculated live from your device clock and time zone, and the sentence beneath converts it into weeks and months.
Count down to something else
Every page below works the same way and stays correct on its own. For a date of your own — a holiday, an exam, a due date, a launch — use the countdown and date difference calculator.