September 1752 Calendar: Britain Skipped 11 Days, Sept. 3 to 13

Britain’s Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 ordered that the day after Sept. 2, 1752 be counted as Sept. 14, “omitting 11 days,” according to the Act’s text on legislation.gov.uk. The dates Sept. 3 to 13, 1752 were never numbered in British calendars. The Act set the new calendar for “his Majesty’s dominions,” and this story shows the month as it was counted, what else the Act changed and where the jump still shows up.

What did September 1752 look like on the calendar?

The weekdays kept their order. Wednesday, Sept. 2, 1752 was followed by Thursday, Sept. 14; only the date numbers jumped. We computed the weekdays from the Act’s dates, so a month page for September 1752 had 19 numbered days instead of 30. Those days were Sept. 1 and Sept. 2, then Sept. 14, Sept. 15, Sept. 16, Sept. 17, Sept. 18, Sept. 19, Sept. 20, Sept. 21, Sept. 22, Sept. 23, Sept. 24, Sept. 25, Sept. 26, Sept. 27, Sept. 28, Sept. 29 and Sept. 30.

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
		1	2	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30

The Act’s section 1 summary reads: “The days to be numbered as now until 2d Sept. 1752; and the day following to be accounted 14 Sept. omitting 11 days.” The count of dates moved forward 11 numbers.

Old Style and New Style: what changed in the 1750 Act?

Rule	Before the Act	After the Act
Day after Sept. 2, 1752	Sept. 3 (our reading of the numbering “as now”)	Sept. 14
Start of the legal year	March 25	Jan. 1
Century years	Not stated in the Act’s summary	Hundredth years are common years of 365 days, except every fourth hundred; 1800, 1900 and 2100 are named

The Act says the legal year before it “beginneth on the twenty-fifth day of March,” and its marginal note for the year reads “Year to commence for the future on 1 Jan.” Section 2 says hundredth years, “except every fourth hundred,” are common years of 365 days, which is the same rule our what is a leap year story explains with the U.S. Naval Observatory’s wording.

Why were 11 days dropped?

The Act gives the number but this story’s sources do not give the arithmetic, so here is our own: the century rule above means 1700 was a common year under the new calendar. The old way of counting treated it as a leap year, so the two systems had pulled one day further apart by 1752. We computed that from the rule; it is not a quotation from the Act.

Did people really demand their 11 days back?

William Hogarth’s painting “An Election Entertainment” includes a banner with the cry “give back our eleven days.” A Royal Museums Greenwich collection page on the work calls it “notable in terms of our collections for the inclusion of the cry” and says 11 days were dropped “to bring the calendar back into alignment with the seasons.”

Stories of riots over the change are widely repeated. The Royal Museums Greenwich page records only the slogan in the painting, and we did not find a riot confirmed in the sources we used, so we do not state one as fact.

Where does 1752 still show up in 2026?

Washington’s birthday. The U.S. National Archives says George Washington “was born in Virginia on February 11, 1731, according to the then-used Julian calendar.” It adds that in 1752 “Britain and all its colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar which moved Washington’s birthday a year and 11 days to February 22, 1732.” The federal observance later moved: the 1968 Monday Holiday Law put it on the third Monday in February. Our Presidents’ Day 2027 story lists what is open and closed that day, Feb. 15, 2027.

The UK tax year. A written answer in the House of Commons on Feb. 28, 1977 (Hansard) said the tax year’s run from April 6 to the following April 5 is “primarily historical,” with “their origin in the reform of the calendar in 1752,” “when, for public accounting purposes, 11 days were added on to the old quarter days.” The date “was adopted for income tax on its reimposition in 1842, and has not been changed since then.” March 25, the old start of the year, plus 11 days is April 5 (our arithmetic).

Printable September 1752 calendar

The one-page sheet lists every date Britain counted in September 1752 with its weekday, marks the omitted Sept. 3 to 13, and quotes the Act, the National Archives and Hansard. Print it next to a modern September calendar from our September printable calendars, or keep it with the printable yearly calendar.

What does this story not cover?

Other countries changed calendars in other years and by other numbers of days. We did not confirm those from an official source, so none are listed here. The same goes for the earlier Gregorian reform of 1582.