At One Place

When was a leap year last skipped?

When was a leap year last skipped?
1900
1900, which was divisible by four and not a leap year

The Gregorian rule is that century years are leap years only when divisible by 400. So 1600 and 2000 were leap years, 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not, and 2100 will not be. Anyone born after 1900 and alive in 2000 lived through the one century year in four hundred that behaves normally, which is why a great deal of software written in the twentieth century got the rule wrong and nobody noticed until later.

What
1900, which was divisible by four and not a leap year
When
1900
Category
Everyday things
Could this change?
Not in any foreseeable way. The event is closed.

Everyday things

Question When
When did the London Underground last gain a line? 24 May 2022
When did the tallest building in the world last change? 2010
When did the prime meridian last move? 1984
When did the Olympics last award medals for art? 1948
When were the Olympic Games last cancelled? 1944
When was a letter last added to the English alphabet? The 1500s and 1600s

This page gives a date and never a "years ago". These pages are built as static files, so a computed interval would freeze at build time and quietly become wrong — which on a reference site is worse than making the reader do the subtraction.

Common questions

When was a leap year last skipped?
1900 — 1900, which was divisible by four and not a leap year.
What happened?
The Gregorian rule is that century years are leap years only when divisible by 400. So 1600 and 2000 were leap years, 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not, and 2100 will not be. Anyone born after 1900 and alive in 2000 lived through the one century year in four hundred that behaves normally, which is why a great deal of software written in the twentieth century got the rule wrong and nobody noticed until later.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked