Contract Terms: When does a contract end? – Aerofiler

This article is about how Aerofiler treats the term of a contract. That's "term" as in the duration of a contract, not "term" as in a provision of a contract. For convenience, we'll refer to the term of a contract in this article as the "contract term".

One of the unique features of Aerofiler is that we let you input the term of a contract as it's written in a contract. We then do the work for you of calculating when the contract will next renew or expire.

But how does Aerofiler calculate when the term of a contract ends? If you have a contract term that runs for one month or one year, when is the last day of the term? For example, if you enter into a 1-month agreement on January 1, does that contract end on January 31 or February 1?

We think the answer to this is the end of day on January 31. In other words, if you have a 1-month agreement starting at the start of January, it should run for all of January, and not spill into February:

Unless a contract specifies the particular time of day it starts, we treat it as starting at the very beginning of the day, since there is nothing to indicate that the contract isn't effective as of midnight on that day. (Of course, this could be impacted by local laws, so you'll need to take those into account.)

Extending on this reasoning, to get the last day of the term, we add the number of months or years in the term to the start date, and then subtract one day. So a 1-year contract starting on October 1, 2019 will end on September 30, 2019.

But what about a 1-month contract that starts on March 31? When you add 1 month to that date, you get April 31, but April of course doesn't have 31 days! Where this occurs, we use the last day of the month and then subtract one day from that. Therefore, that 1-month contract will end on April 29.

A few more examples

For a contract that starts on January 1 and runs for one month, it will expire at the end of January 31. If it is renewed for a second month, the renewal term will start on February 1 and end on February 28 (for a non-leap year) or February 29 (for a leap year).

For a contract that starts on March 31 and runs for one month, it will expire at the end of April 29. If it is renewed for another month, the renewal term will start on April 30 and end on May 29.

However, contrast this with a contract that starts on March 31 and runs for two months. That contract term will expire at the end of on May 30. This means that a 2-month term can be different to two consecutive 1-month terms.