What months are in each calendar quarter?

Q1 is January to March, Q2 is April to June, Q3 is July to September and Q4 is October to December. They are not equal in length: Q1 has 90 days, or 91 in a leap year, while Q3 and Q4 both have 92.

Why is the US federal fiscal year different from the calendar year?

The US federal fiscal year runs from 1 October to 30 September and is named after the calendar year in which it ends. The October start was adopted in the mid-1970s to give Congress more time to complete the appropriations process before spending began.

Does Q1 always mean January to March?

No. Q1 is the first quarter of whichever financial year is meant. For a fiscal year beginning in October, Q1 is October to December; for one beginning in April, Q1 is April to June. Always state whether a quarter is fiscal or calendar.

What is a 4-4-5 fiscal calendar?

A reporting calendar that divides each quarter into periods of four, four and five weeks instead of using calendar months. Every quarter is thirteen weeks and ends on the same weekday, which aids comparison. Because 52 weeks is only 364 days, a 53rd week is added every five or six years.

Fiscal Quarter Explained

Someone says results are due in Q3 and half the room pictures the wrong three months. A fiscal quarter is only meaningful once you know which year it belongs to, because the calendar quarters everyone assumes and the fiscal quarters an organisation actually reports on are frequently two different things. Get the two confused and a deadline moves by up to nine months.

This article sets out how Q1 to Q4 map to months, why fiscal years so often start somewhere other than January, and which countries and companies run on which schedule. To see which calendar quarter a date falls in without doing the arithmetic, use the quarter page.

What Is a Fiscal Quarter?

A fiscal quarter is a three-month block of an organisation's financial year, used for reporting, budgeting and forecasting. Four of them make a fiscal year. They are labelled Q1 to Q4 in order from the start of that year, not from January.

That last point is the whole difficulty. Q1 is always the first quarter of the fiscal year in question, so an organisation whose year begins in October has a Q1 running October to December — the same three months another organisation calls Q4. The label carries no fixed months of its own.

How Q1 to Q4 Map to Months

For a calendar year, the mapping is straightforward and worth committing to memory:

Q1: January, February, March. 90 days, or 91 in a leap year — the shortest quarter of the four.
Q2: April, May, June. 91 days.
Q3: July, August, September. 92 days.
Q4: October, November, December. 92 days.

The quarters are not equal in length, which matters more than most people expect. Comparing Q1 revenue with Q4 revenue compares 90 days against 92, a difference of just over two per cent in trading days before any business factor is considered. Where those uneven month lengths come from is covered in how many days in each month.

Why Do Fiscal Years Differ from Calendar Years?

Because the natural rhythm of a business or a government rarely starts on 1 January. Organisations choose a fiscal year that ends in a quiet period, so the annual close and audit do not collide with peak trading, harvest, an election cycle or a legislative timetable.

A retailer that takes a large share of its revenue in December has every reason not to close its books days later while stock counts and returns are still moving. A government needs its budget passed before the money is spent, which means aligning the financial year with the parliamentary or congressional calendar rather than the Gregorian one. The choice is practical, and once made it is rarely revisited, because changing it requires a stub period that makes every year-on-year comparison awkward.

There is a second reason, which is tax. Where the tax year is fixed by statute, aligning the accounting year to it removes a whole layer of reconciliation, so a country's fiscal quarter boundaries tend to pull local businesses into the same rhythm. The result is that fiscal quarters cluster by jurisdiction rather than by industry.

National Fiscal Years Around the World

The main national variants are worth knowing because they change what a fiscal quarter means in official statistics:

United States federal government: 1 October to 30 September, with the year named for the calendar year in which it ends. Its Q1 is October to December. The start moved from July to October in the mid-1970s to give Congress more time to pass appropriations.
United Kingdom: the government financial year runs 1 April to 31 March, while the personal tax year runs 6 April to 5 April — a date inherited from the old Lady Day quarter and the eleven days dropped when Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752.
Japan and India: 1 April to 31 March, so their fiscal Q1 covers April to June.
Australia and New Zealand: 1 July to 30 June, making fiscal Q1 the July to September block.

Because these differ, cross-border comparisons should always name the months rather than the quarter label. "Q2" in a document from three countries can mean three different periods.

Corporate Fiscal Quarters

Large companies choose their own year ends, and several well-known ones sit nowhere near December. Microsoft's fiscal year ends on 30 June, so its fiscal Q1 is July to September. Apple's ends on the last Saturday of September, which puts the holiday trading period in its fiscal Q1 rather than Q4. Several retailers end their year in late January so that Christmas sales and the returns that follow fall inside the same fiscal year.

Many of them also do not use calendar months at all. The 4-4-5 calendar splits each quarter into three periods of four, four and five weeks, giving thirteen-week quarters that always end on the same weekday and always contain the same number of trading weekends. The cost is that 52 weeks is 364 days, so a 53rd week has to be inserted every five or six years, producing one unusually long fiscal quarter. Retailers favour a 4-5-4 variant of the same idea for exactly the same reason.

The practical consequence is that a company's fiscal quarter may not begin or end on the first or last day of a month at all. A quarter can close on a Saturday in the middle of a week, which makes comparison with a competitor reporting on calendar months an approximation rather than a like-for-like reading. Analysts adjust for this; casual readers usually do not.

How Do You Work Out Which Fiscal Quarter You Are In?

Start from the fiscal year's first month, count forward in threes, and label the blocks Q1 to Q4. If the fiscal year begins in October, October to December is Q1, January to March is Q2, April to June is Q3 and July to September is Q4.

Two habits prevent almost all errors. First, always state the year type alongside the quarter, as in "fiscal Q3" or "calendar Q3". Second, write the months out in anything that will be read later. The this month page shows where you currently stand, and next month is useful when a quarter boundary is approaching and the deadline sits on the other side of it. Quarter ends also compress the accounting timetable, since a quarter close carries more work than an ordinary one — the sequence is described in month end close. When a quarterly obligation is written as a number of days rather than as months, the arithmetic changes again, as explained in 30, 60 and 90 day date math.

Conclusion

A fiscal quarter is simply the first, second, third or fourth three-month block of a financial year, and the confusion comes entirely from that year not starting in January. Calendar quarters run January to March, April to June, July to September and October to December, at 90 to 92 days each. Government and corporate fiscal years start in October, April, July or the last week of some other month, shifting every quarter label with them. Name the months whenever it matters, and check any date on the quarter page or the rest of months.now.

Fiscal Quarters Explained: How Q1 to Q4 Map to the Months