ISO week date

The ISO week date system is a leap week calendar system that is part of the ISO 8601 date and time standard issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). It is used (mainly) in government and business for fiscal years, as well as in timekeeping. The system specifies a week year atop the Gregorian calendar by defining a notation for ordinal weeks of the year.

The Gregorian leap cycle, which has 97 leap days spread across 400 years, contains a whole number of weeks (20871). In every cycle there are 71 years with an additional 53rd week. An average year is exactly 52.1775 weeks long; months average at 4.348125 weeks.

An ISO week-numbering year (also called ISO year informally) has 52 or 53 full weeks. That is 364 or 371 days instead of the usual 365 or 366 days. The extra week is referred to here as a leap week, although ISO 8601 does not use this term. Weeks start with Monday. The first week of a year is the week that contains the first Thursday of the year (and, hence, always contains 4 January). ISO week year numbering therefore slightly deviates from the Gregorian for some days close to 1 January.