How many days are left in the year? It is a question people start asking somewhere around September, and then cannot stop asking. The answer is simple arithmetic — and yet almost nothing on the web shows it to you without also trying to alarm you about it.
So I built the Time Progress tracker: four rings that count down the year, the month, the week and the day, next to a sky that is drawn from your actual daylight. Here is how to work out the number yourself, and what the tool does differently.
How Many Days Are Left in the Year?
The formula is one subtraction:
days left = days in the year − day of the year
A common year has 365 days and a leap year has 366. So on 4 October 2026 — day 277 of a 365-day year — there are 88 days left, which is 24% of the year still ahead of you.
If you would rather not count, here is the number on the last day of every month:
| Month ends | Day of year | Days left in the year |
|---|---|---|
| 31 January | 31 | 334 |
| 28 February | 59 | 306 |
| 31 March | 90 | 275 |
| 30 April | 120 | 245 |
| 31 May | 151 | 214 |
| 30 June | 181 | 184 |
| 31 July | 212 | 153 |
| 31 August | 243 | 122 |
| 30 September | 273 | 92 |
| 31 October | 304 | 61 |
| 30 November | 334 | 31 |
| 31 December | 365 | 0 |
One oddity worth knowing: this table holds in leap years too. Both the day of the year and the length of the year go up by one, so they cancel out. The only row that changes is January — on 31 January a leap year still has 335 days to run instead of 334.
Why Another Time Tracker?
There are already plenty of year-progress bars. The problem is the progress bar itself.
A progress bar spent decades teaching people one thing: be patient, this will be over soon. It is the shape of a download, an install, a loading screen. Pointing that shape at your life and expecting it to make you feel something is asking the wrong tool to do the job.
It is also the wrong shape. Days, weeks, months and years are cycles — they close and start again. A straight line says "one-way trip with an end". A circle says "you have been here before, and you will be here again", which is both truer and kinder.
And most time tools are built to alarm. That fails on its own terms: an alarming tool gets closed. This one is built to be left open, so it takes the opposite approach. There is no red, no orange, no warning tier. Elapsed time is not an error state.
Key Features
Four Countdown Rings
Year, month, week and day, each in its own fixed colour. Every ring reads the same way, and it reads in the order you actually care about:
- The big number in the middle is what is left —
88 days to go, not "76% gone" - The strong arc is time already elapsed
- The pale warm band is time you still have
- The small number below is the elapsed percentage, for when you want the precision
Drawing the remainder as a colour rather than leaving it as empty space is a deliberate trade. Making "what's left" visually obvious usually means drawing a bar that drains, and a draining bar is an anxious thing. The compromise here is a division of labour: the countdown carries the precision, the geometry carries warmth and rough proportion.
Today's Light Is Real
The second panel is a sky computed from the actual solar position for your latitude and today's date. The sun sits where it really is, the colour follows its real elevation, and the arc it traces is today's real path.
That means the difference between seasons is not decoration — it is physics. In December the arc runs low and short; in June it climbs high and long. Sunrise, sunset and hours of daylight fall out of the same maths.
The page never asks for your location on load. Latitude cannot be guessed, so it starts from a stated approximation, says so plainly, and offers a button if you want the sky to be exact. A granted position is remembered locally, and nowhere else.
This Month's Moon
The moon's phase is the month made visible, and the reason it always comes back is the comforting part. It is also, on its own, unable to answer "how much of the month is left" — illuminated fraction runs from nothing to full and back to nothing, so it is not a measure of progress at all. That is exactly why the moon has rings around it too.
Warm in Both Themes
The dark theme is warm as well — deep umber and plum rather than the usual neutral black and blue. A tool you leave open all evening should not look like a terminal at midnight.
Use Cases
Answering the question without counting
Open the page and the four countdowns are already there. No input, no signup, no cookie banner.
An ambient display you leave open
It updates once a second and costs almost nothing. Pin the tab and let it sit there: the rings drift, the sky changes colour, the moon fills and empties. It is closer to a window than a dashboard.
Sharing a moment
The 📷 Share button (or Cmd/Ctrl + S) renders a high-resolution PNG of the whole page, so you can post the exact state of your year without a screenshot tool.
Noticing the daylight
Watching the arc get lower through autumn is a quieter way to feel the year turn than reading a percentage. Some people find that more persuasive.
How to Use It
- Open the page — everything is already running, nothing to configure
- Read the rings — the big number is what is left, the band shows how much remains
- Toggle the theme with 🌙 / ☀️ if you prefer the warm dark version
- Make the sky exact — press "Use my location" once if you want true daylight for where you are
- Share it with 📷 Share, or
Cmd/Ctrl + S
It works on phones, tablets and desktops, with the rings folding into a 2×2 block on narrow screens.
Technical Design
- No build step — static HTML, CSS and ES modules, no bundler and nothing to install
- No trackers, no cookies, no accounts — your theme and, if you allow it, your location live in local storage and nowhere else
- The astronomy is real — a low-precision solar position algorithm and a synodic month, both small enough to run in a plain browser
- One library, loaded lazily — html2canvas arrives only when you press Share, so a normal visit makes no third-party script request at all
Try the Time Progress Tracker
Whether you are counting down to the end of the year, watching the days of a project tick past, or just want to know how much light is left this afternoon, open the Time Progress tracker. Free, no signup, and it will tell you exactly how many days you have left.
Have feedback or a feature request? Let me know.