Is there always 364 days in a year?

Simple answer: 52 weeks

Precise answer = 52.177457 weeks or Just under 52 weeks 1 day and 6 hours 

52 weeks 1 day and just under 6 hours

1 year is the time it takes for the earth to go around the sun. But since the Earth spins on it’s axis and we call one of those spins a day, then we can give a measurement in days and therefore weeks fairly accurately.

We all know there are 7 days in a week. But I’ve always wondered why people say there are 52 weeks in a year.
After all, 52*7 is only 364 and we all know there are 365 days in a non-leap year and 366 days in a leap year.

Therefore there are always MORE than 52 weeks in a year. Sometimes 52 weeks 1 day (non-leap year). Sometimes 52 weeks and 2 days (leap year).

A leap year occurs every year that is divisible 4 with the exception of every century year not divisible by 400

It is fairly common for people to say there are actually 365 and a quarter days (365.25) in a year. But that is also wrong as this doesn’t account for the centuries that are not divisible by 400 and therefore not a leap year. It would be correct to say that ‘it takes the earth just less than 365.25 days to go around the sun’.

In the Gregorian calendar there are only 365 days, therefore on leap years an extra day is added on February 29th to account for this quarter of a day deviation, which would otherwise lead to the calendar being out of sync with reality after not too long. The next leap day is February 29th 2020.

Is 2016 a leap year?

Yes. It is divisible by 4

Is 2017 a leap year?

No. It is NOT divisible by 4

Is 2018 a leap year?

No. It is NOT divisible by 4

Is 2019 a leap year?

No. It is NOT divisible by 4

Is 2020 a leap year?

Yes. It is divisible by 4

Is 2000 a leap year?

Yes. It is centurial and it is divisible by 400

Is 1900 a leap year?

No. It is centurial and NOT divisible by 400

Is 2100 a leap year?

No. It is centurial and NOT divisible by 400

What about working days?

How many working days are there in a year?

How many working days are there in September 2016?

How many working days are there in October 2016?

One of the great joys and headaches of writing about science for a D.C. audience is that there are a lot of brilliant people reading: engineers at NASA, doctors for the National Institutes of Health, paleontologists at the Smithsonian, etc. And they always notice when I make a mistake.

So I wasn't totally surprised when I arrived at work Thursday morning and found a disgruntled message on my answering machine. My story about the discovery of a nearby solar system with seven Earth-sized exoplanets had run in that day's paper. And Bert Schwarzschild, a particle physicist and former editor of the magazine Physics Today, had a bone to pick about one small number in the piece: 365.26.

That's how long we said a year on Earth lasts in a graphic that accompanied the story. The number came from NASA, so I felt pretty confident in it. But Schwarzschild said it wasn't right. A year is 365.24 days long — that's why we have to skip a leap day every 100 years.

Puzzled, I looked up the question online, only to end up more confused. No website I checked could agree on an exact number. Was it 365.25, as NASA states on this page? Or 365.242196, as explained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology? Or had our original illustration been right all along, as this Jet Propulsion Laboratory profile suggests?

I called up the U.S. Naval Observatory, home of America's master clock. (Along with NIST, the Naval Observatory also operates the website time.gov, which may be my new favorite government URL.) If anyone could tell me the correct length of the year, it was them.

“Well, it depends on what year you're referring to,” said Geoff Chester, a public affairs officer for USNO, when I explained my quandary to him.

What year? There's more than one?

“There are four principal years that are in use,” Chester told me. “Nothing’s as simple as it seems when it comes to this stuff.”

First, there's the Julian year, which is exactly 365.25 days long. It's not very precise, since it's just a number someone decided on, rather than an exact measurement of an astrophysical phenomenon. But when it was introduced by the Julius Caesar in 46 B.C., it was revolutionary.

Before then, the Romans knew that it took about 365.25 days for the Earth to orbit the sun, but they decided to stick to a 355 day calendar anyway. Every so often the high priest of Rome would call for an “intercalary month” to put the calendar back on track. Theoretically these intercalations were supposed to be systematic, but they often were abused — priests would call for an extra month when their friends were in power, or omit a needed month if an enemy was consul. Things got pretty wonky pretty quickly, and the last years before Caesar swept in with his new system were known as “the years of confusion.”

We don't use the Julian year for calendars any more, but it is used to define the light-year as a measurement of distance.

Modern calendars are set according to the tropical year, which tracks the amount of time it takes to get from spring equinox to spring equinox — about 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds, or 365.2422 days. It's probably the most well-known measure of a year because it's the most useful for people here on Earth. If you want to know when the seasons will change, the tropical year will tell you.

But there's a not-so-tiny problem with the tropical year: the Earth wobbles. Instead of spinning like a globe on an axis, we turn like a top. This means that the orientation of Earth's equator is constantly shifting ever so slightly; thus the moment of the equinox (when the equator passes through the center of the sun) also changes. The consequence of all this wobbling is that a tropical year ends about 20 minutes before Earth actually completes an orbit of the sun.

If you want to know how long that journey takes, you've got to look at the anomalistic year. That's the measurement of the number of days it takes for the Earth to return to its perihelion — the point at which it is closest to the sun. It comes out to about 365.259636 days per year.

But Earth's orbit doesn't stay the same each year. The large, looming presence of Jupiter in our solar system means that the ellipse that Earth circumscribes around the sun is distorted. If you're trying to do calculations across long time spans, or keep a telescope pointed at the same spot in the galaxy, then this measurement might lead you astray.

“Everything moves in the universe,” explained Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “It really causes problems.”

Astronomers' solution is to measure time by the largest, most fixed frame they can find: the entire cosmos. They abide by the sidereal year, the amount of time it takes for the sun to return to the same position relative to the fixed (most distant) stars. This year is 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 9 seconds, or about 365.26 days long. Since this is the measurement most useful to astronomers, it makes sense that NASA used it to compare Earth to the TRAPPIST-1 exoplanets.

McDowell and his colleagues also live by the sidereal day, which is the amount of time it takes Earth to complete a single rotation relative to the fixed stars. This day is four minutes shorter than our 24-hour one, but astronomers don't mind.

We don’t care about the sun — we’re never out when it’s up,” McDowell laughed. “We just want our observatories to point to the same spot in the sky they did yesterday.”

Weirdly, the days in a sidereal year are ordinary days, not sidereal ones. This is why people think astrophysics is hard. (Okay, maybe there are a few other reasons.)

But even the sidereal year is imperfect, McDowell said. After all, the so-called fixed stars aren't really fixed — everything in the universe is moving away from everything else at an accelerating rate. If you take the theory of general relativity into account, you'll find that time passes differently on Earth than it does elsewhere in space.

“Every aspect of time, from the very small to these big scales … all of these things are fraught with a, 'Yes, but actually' caveat,” McDowell said.

“Sure, we’ve refined and refined over the centuries,” he acknowledged — just ask the Romans who lived through the “years of confusion.” But clearly, the confusion isn't over yet.

Read more:

When were there 364 days in a year?

It divided the year into four seasons of exactly 13 weeks. Each season consisted of two 30-day months followed by one 31-day month, with the 31st day ending the season, so that Enoch's year consisted of exactly 364 days. The Enoch calendar was purportedly given to Enoch by the angel Uriel.

Why are there not 364 days in a year?

There is no missing day. 52 weeks * 7 days = 364, which means the solar year of 365 days needs an extra day, not a missing day. This comes about because most months have 30 or 31 days.

Is 364.25 days in a year?

Background: The true length of a year on Earth is 365.2422 days, or about 365.25 days. We keep our calendar in sync with the seasons by having most years 365 days long but making just under 1/4 of all years 366-day "leap" years.

Does a year ever have 367 days?

By adding a second leap day (Friday, February 30) Sweden reverted to the Julian calendar and the rest of the year (from Saturday, March 1) was in sync with the Julian calendar. Sweden finally made the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1753. This year has 367 days.