How to Subtract Days from Date in PHP?

This example shows how to subtract days from a given date using the strtotime() function in PHP.

	Syntax

$new_date =  date('Y-m-d', strtotime($given_date. ' - N days'));

Here is an example of subtracting 5 days from January 2, 2024

Example

<?php
  $given_date = "2024-01-02";
  $days_to_subtract = 5;
  $new_date =  date('Y-m-d', strtotime($given_date. " - {$days_to_subtract} days"));
  echo $new_date;
?>

Output

2023-12-28

In this example, the strtotime() function is used to convert the given date into a Unix timestamp, and then subtract the specified days. The result is formatted using the date() function with the 'Y-m-d' format.