Date and time

The Date and time tools answer questions about time itself: a day in the calendar, or how long something takes, rather than an amount. The first is the one most shoppers meet sooner or later: something bought has gone wrong, and how long is there to do something about it? The Consumer Rights Act checker takes the delivery date and returns every deadline that follows from it under UK law.

• The short-term right to reject, 30 days from the day after delivery, paused while a repair or replacement is under way.
• The 6 months in which a fault is presumed to have been there from the start.
• The limitation period for a court claim: 6 years in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, 5 years in Scotland.

The speech time calculator turns a word count or a pasted text into minutes and seconds, and minutes back into words. At its average pace of 140 words a minute, a 1,000 word speech takes 7 minutes and 9 seconds.

Its paces start from reading rates measured in each language, so the German, Polish or Italian pages fit a different number of words into a minute. Reading aloud and silent reading are measured; the three speaking paces are derived from them, and every page says which is which.

The days until countdown counts the days left to the dates the UK keeps: Christmas, Easter and the dates hung on it, Bonfire Night, the bank holidays of each nation, exam results days and the school holidays Wales and Northern Ireland publish. Counted from 14 October 2026, Christmas Day is 72 days away.

The ILR and British citizenship calculator dates two applications from one list of trips abroad. Indefinite leave to remain on the Skilled Worker route needs 5 years with no more than 180 days outside the UK in any 12 months, and the application may go in 28 days before the period is complete.

Naturalisation as a British citizen follows under the British Nationality Act 1981: at most 450 days abroad in 5 years and 90 in the final 12 months, with ILR held for that last year. The spouse or civil partner of a British citizen needs 3 years and no wait after ILR.

Days abroad are whole days, and the earned settlement proposal is shown as a proposal, not as the rule.

The name day finder looks up the days on which a first name is celebrated, in the Catholic calendar of England or in the Polish, Italian, German, Spanish, French or Dutch calendar. Britain has no name day custom of its own, so most people use it for a family's calendar: the Polish one holds 2,470 names. It marks the usual date, shows the next one and the days left, and for a name with several saints reads two customs that start from the birthday.

Laws word their periods in different ways, and a day either way can decide a claim. A period of days that begins the day after an event ends on a different date from one that begins with the event itself, and a period of months that starts on the 31st has to end somewhere in a shorter month. Each tool here follows the wording of the statute it cites and says which convention it uses.

The guarantee checker, the speech time calculator and the citizenship date calculator never use today's date: their results depend only on what you enter, so a shared link shows exactly what you saw. The countdown and the name day finder read today's date, from your own device and only in your browser; with a start date entered the countdown gives the same answer on any day, and the name days themselves never depend on the date. How each rule was checked is set out in the methodology.

Every deadline from the Consumer Rights Act checker starts from the day the goods arrived, not the day they were paid for. A receipt, a bank or card statement, an order email or a delivery note can each show when and where the goods were bought and when they reached you.

Two more dates are worth keeping with those papers. Where the trader agreed to install the goods, the first clock waits until the work is finished and you have been told, so that message marks its start. If the goods go away for a repair or a replacement within the short-term right to reject, the day you asked and the day they came back mark the pause. Both days count.

A date from these tools is the day a period ends under the rule as written. Courts and traders can still argue about when a period began, whether a pause applied or whether goods were faulty at all, and the tool cannot settle those questions.

The pages explain the rules; they do not tell anyone what to do with a particular claim. Citizens Advice, Advice Direct Scotland and Trading Standards give free help with real disputes.