How to Get the Year from a Date in T-SQL

Problem

You’d like to get the year from a date field in a SQL Server database.

Example

Our database has a table named Children with data in the columns Id, FirstName, LastName, and BirthDate.

Let’s get the year from each child’s birthdate.

Solution

We’ll use the YEAR() function. Here’s the query you would write:

SELECT 
  FirstName,
  LastName,
  YEAR(BirthDate) AS BirthYear
FROM Children;

Here’s the result of the query:

Discussion

Use SQL Server’s YEAR() function if you want to get the year part from a date. This function takes only one argument – a date, in one of the date and time or date data types. (In our example, the column BirthDate is a date data type). The argument can be a column name or an expression. (In our example, the argument is the BirthDate column.)

The YEAR() function returns an integer. For Jane Smith, it returns the integer 2018 from the birth date '2018-06-20'.