

therefore there are 366 days in total in a leap year. The month of February of the leap year has 29 days instead of 28 days. Leap year is actually a calendar year that has one additional day. Students should have a good calculation for leap year as it is an important topic which is asked in most of the competitive examinations. The year is not a leap year (if it has 365 days). The year is a leap year (if it has 366 days). If the year is evenly divisible by four hundred, then go to step 4. If the year is evenly divisible by a hundred, then go to step 3. If the year is evenly divisible by four, then go to step 2. To determine whether any given year is a leap year, follow these steps:
Leap years list how to#
How to Determine Whether Any Year is a Leap Year? So another rule says that every 400 years is a leap year again, this gets us 365.2425 days per year (that is 1 day regained every 400 years equals 0.0025 days per year), which is close to 365.242375 not to matter much.

So every 100 years we don't have a leap year, and that gets us 365.24 days per year (1 day less in 100 years = -0.01 days per year). This is fairly close but is wrong by about 1 day every 100 years. So every fourth year we add an extra day (the 29th of February), which makes 365.25 days a year. We have discussed above, we know that because the Earth rotates about 365.242375 times a year but a normal year is 365 days, something has to be done to "catch up" the extra 0.242375 days a year. are leap years as they are divisible by 400, and years 300, 700, 100, etc are not leap years as these years are not divisible by 400. Hence, we cannot consider the year 700 as a leap year.Įxample: 400, 800, 1200, etc. Even though the year 700 is divisible by 4 but not by the number 400. For a century, the logic follows that any year should always be divisible by 400 not by 4. are not divisible by 4 completely, therefore, they are normal years.Ī year 700 is completely divisible by 4, but this year is not considered as a leap year. In order to make the investigation easier, any year which is divisible by the number 4 completely (that is the remainder becomes zero) is considered as a leap year.Įxample: 1888, 2012, 2016 are known to be leap years as it’s completely divisible by 4. The next leap year comes in 1904 (The year 1900 is not a leap year). The leap year occurs every 4 years, but there are scenarios where the gap between two leap years was 8 years instead of the regular 4 years.Įxample: The year 1896 is a leap year. Here’s a table that shows how it works:īecause we’ve subtracted approximately six hours - or we can say that ¼ of a day - from 2017, 2018, and the year 2019, we have to make up that time in 2020 and that’s why we have a leap day! To make sure that we count that extra part of a day, we add one day to the calendar every four years. So, our one year is not an exact number of days.īecause of that, we round the days in a year down to 365 for most years.

It takes our planet Earth approximately 365 days and 6 hours to orbit the Sun, that is, it takes Earth approximately 24 hours - 1 day - to rotate on its axis. A day can be defined as the amount of time it takes a planet to finish one rotation on its axis. This is called a leap year.Ī year can be defined as the amount of time it takes any planet to orbit its star one time. But approximately every four years, the month of February has 29 days instead of 28. In an ordinary year, if you were to count all the days in a calendar from January to December, you’d count it as 365 days.

To make up for the missing partial day, we add one day to our calendar approximately every four years and that is known as a leap year. We usually round the days in a calendar year to 365, that is 365 days in a year. It takes approximately 365.25 days for our planet Earth to orbit the Sun - that is a solar year.
