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Asked: 2026-05-21T09:39:12+00:00

How do I store a credit card’s expiration date if it only consists of

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How do I store a credit card’s expiration date if it only consists of the month and year?

The date field in mysql accepts the following format: yyyy-mm-dd. An expiration date without a day is not invalid using that format.

Do I use varchar, instead? And does that not prevent me from making calculations to determine when cards expire and what not?

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  1. Editorial Team

    For Jan 2014:

    2014-01-00

    It’s common to use 00 for month and day that are undefined. From the MySQL reference manual:

    Some date functions can be used with “zero” dates or incomplete dates such as ‘2001-11-00’, whereas others cannot. Functions that extract parts of dates typically work with incomplete dates and thus can return 0 when you might otherwise expect a nonzero value. For example:

      mysql> SELECT DAYOFMONTH('2001-11-00'), MONTH('2005-00-00');
      -> 0, 0

    and later on in the manual for DATE_FORMAT:

    Ranges for the month and day
    specifiers begin with zero due to the
    fact that MySQL permits the storing of
    incomplete dates such as ‘2014-00-00’.

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