Make.com Date and Time How to Work With Dates in Your Scenarios

Working with dates and times in Make.com looks simple at first. Then you spend an hour figuring out why the date comes out in the wrong format or shifted by an hour.

Make.com date and time handling has its rules. Once you understand them, most problems disappear.

How Make.com Stores Dates and Times Internally

Make.com uses ISO 8601 format internally — for example 2026-04-20T14:30:00.000Z. The “Z” at the end means UTC timezone.

When you receive a date from a module (Google Sheets, HTTP, Webhook), Make.com automatically parses it if it recognizes the format. If not, you need to handle it manually with parseDate.

formatDate - the Core Function for Date Output

formatDate converts a date into a readable text format.

Basic syntax:

{{formatDate(date; "format")}}
{{formatDate(date; "format"; "timezone")}}

Most common patterns:

{{formatDate(now; "YYYY-MM-DD")}}
→ 2026-04-20

{{formatDate(now; "MM/DD/YYYY")}}
→ 04/20/2026

{{formatDate(now; "MM/DD/YYYY HH:mm")}}
→ 04/20/2026 14:30

{{formatDate(now; "MMMM D, YYYY")}}
→ April 20, 2026

💡 now is a variable that returns the current date and time at the moment the scenario runs.

parseDate - When Make.com Doesn’t Recognize the Date

Some systems send dates in non-standard formats — for example 20/04/2026 or April 20, 2026. Make.com won’t automatically treat these as dates.

Use parseDate for manual parsing:

{{parseDate("20/04/2026"; "DD/MM/YYYY")}}
{{parseDate("April 20, 2026"; "MMMM D, YYYY")}}

The input format must exactly match the structure of the string you’re parsing.

Timezones - the Biggest Gotcha

This is where most users hit problems. Make.com works internally in UTC. If you don’t explicitly set the timezone, you can get dates shifted by an hour or more.

Correct approach:

// Display date in Prague time (CET/CEST)
{{formatDate(now; "MM/DD/YYYY HH:mm"; "Europe/Prague")}}

// Display date in New York time
{{formatDate(now; "MM/DD/YYYY HH:mm"; "America/New_York")}}

The third parameter of formatDate is the timezone in IANA format (e.g. Europe/Prague, UTC, America/New_York).

⚠️ Set the scenario timezone in the scenario Settings. This affects how Make.com displays dates in logs and directly affects the now variable.

Date Arithmetic - Calculating With Dates

Adding/subtracting days

// Date 7 days from now
{{addDays(now; 7)}}

// Date 30 days ago
{{addDays(now; -30)}}

// First day of current month
{{setDate(now; 1)}}

Comparing dates

For date comparisons in conditions (Filter, Router) use operators:

• {{1.date}} is greater than {{addDays(now; -7)}} = date is less than 7 days old

Most Common Problems and Solutions

Date is off by one hour - timezone issue. Add the third parameter to formatDate or adjust the scenario timezone setting.

Make.com doesn’t recognize the date as a date - use parseDate with an explicit format.

Date difference is wrong - make sure you’re comparing dates in the same timezone.

Date and Time Toolkit

I collected these patterns across hundreds of scenarios. The result is the Make.com Date and Time Toolkit — ready-made IML expressions and blueprints for the most common date/time cases.

Instead of experimenting with how to correctly parse a date from Pipedrive or calculate working days between two dates — the right pattern is right there.

Summary

Make.com date and time works reliably if you follow a few basic rules: use formatDate for output, parseDate for non-standard inputs, and always handle timezones explicitly.

Once you’ve got these basics down, the vast majority of date problems in your scenarios will disappear.