Today's date in the Persian (Shamsi) calendar

If you deal with Iran or Afghanistan, you hit this small wall a lot: someone asks for “today’s date” and they mean the Shamsi one, not the Gregorian date your phone shows. The two calendars run side by side, on different years entirely, so the answer is never the one already on your screen.

The reliable way to get it right, every time, is to convert rather than count. Here is the tool set to do exactly that:

Read today, both ways

Open the converter, pick today on the Gregorian side, and the Shamsi date appears next to it. You will see three parts on the Persian side, and they are worth naming because the order trips people coming from a Gregorian habit:

• Day of the month, 1 to 29, 30, or 31.
• Month, one of the twelve Persian months from Farvardin (the first) to Esfand (the last).
• Year, currently in the 1400s, written with four digits like 1404.

So, for example, a date such as 27 Khordad 1404 reads day, then month, then year, the same field order as English but with Persian month names and a year that is roughly 621 behind the Gregorian one.

Why the Persian year is not “this year minus a fixed number”

It is tempting to memorise a single offset and subtract it. It almost works, and that is the trap. The Persian year begins on 1 Farvardin, the day of the spring equinox, which lands around 21 March rather than 1 January (source: Encyclopædia Britannica, “Iranian calendar”). For most of the Gregorian year the two are 621 apart, but in the stretch between 1 January and Nowruz they are 622 apart, because the Persian calendar has not rolled over to its new year yet.

That is why “today in Shamsi” can sit in 1404 in the summer and 1404 again in winter, then flip to 1405 only once Nowruz arrives. The gap is not a bug; it is the two calendars starting their years at different points. If you want the full picture of why the Gregorian label on Nowruz itself drifts between 20 and 21 March, that is its own story in why Nowruz isn’t always on the same Gregorian day.

Months have fixed lengths, which makes the day easy

One thing the Persian calendar does more tidily than the Gregorian one: the month lengths follow a simple, fixed pattern. The first six months each have 31 days, the next five have 30, and the last month, Esfand, has 29 days, gaining a 30th only in a leap year. There is no 28-day oddity sitting in the middle of the year the way February behaves on the Gregorian side.

That regularity is handy when you are sanity-checking a converted date: if a tool ever hands you “31 Mehr,” you know something is off, because Mehr only has 30 days. For the full month-by-month breakdown, see the Persian calendar months.

Converting any date, not just today

The same approach works for any date you need in Shamsi, not only the current one. A birthday, a contract date, a visa stamp, a historical event: type the Gregorian date and read the Persian one, or go the other way and enter a Shamsi date to get the Gregorian. Because the converter works on calendar dates rather than timestamps, your time zone never quietly shifts the answer by a day, which is a common way manual conversion goes wrong near midnight.

If you specifically need to count the span between two dates rather than convert one, the days between dates guide covers that, and the age calculator handles “how old is this in the Persian calendar” without any mental arithmetic.

The short version: today’s Shamsi date is only ever one conversion away, and the year depends on which side of Nowruz you are standing on. Set the converter to today whenever you need the current Persian date, and use it the same way for any other date you have to move between the two calendars.