What quarter is it?

When Q4 starts

Quarters count from the first day of the year, so the same month is a different quarter in each row. For a calendar year, Q3 ends on September 30. A US federal fiscal year is named for the year it ends in, so FY2027 starts on October 1, 2026. The first eleven months of FY2026 ran from October 2025 through August 2026.

Why “what quarter is it” has more than one answer

Sunday, September 27, 2026 was in Q3 of the calendar year, Q4 of the US government’s FY2026 and Q1 of Microsoft’s FY2027. It was the first day of Apple’s FY2027 and the last day of Starbucks’ fiscal 2026. That’s five answers for one Sunday, each one correct in somebody’s spreadsheet.

So the answer depends on whose books you keep, though every one of them has a Q4 in which somebody asks you to move the needle.

What happens in Q4

Q4 is when budgets get spent and costs get cut, sometimes by the same department. A team with money left near the year’s end has weeks to use it, or next year’s budget shrinks to match. So the last quarter fills up with a big dinner, new chairs and a course at a nice hotel. For a US federal office that rush comes in September, the last month of its year.

Q4 is also when savings get timed to land in this year’s books. The overtime rate goes, or the holiday premium does, in a memo that could have come out of the corporate bullshit generator. It calls the holidays a chance to rest. When nobody then volunteers to work them, the next memo is disappointed in the team.

How many quarters in a year

Four. In 2026 the calendar quarters run 90, 91, 92 and 92 days, because February is short, so Q1 gets two days fewer than Q3 to hit its number. In a leap year the first quarter gains a day back.

A company year of 52 weeks splits into four quarters of 13 weeks, or 91 days each. Retailers and chipmakers count their years in whole weeks, and the ISO week number system works the same way: a year gets a 53rd week every five or six years.

Fiscal years at 22 companies

How company quarters are counted

Nine of these companies end their year on the last day of a month, so each quarter is three calendar months. The other 13 end on a set weekday, which makes a year of 52 or 53 weeks and a quarter of 13.

When a year has a 53rd week, Apple adds it to its first quarter, and Nvidia and Disney to their fourth. Costco splits its year into thirteen 4-week periods, so its quarters run 12, 12, 12 and 16 weeks. Where a company’s filing doesn’t say which quarter gets the extra week, we count it in the fourth.

Retailers’ 4-5-4 calendar splits each quarter into months of 4, 5 and 4 weeks, and its years last had 53 weeks in fiscal 2012, 2017 and 2023.

Target and Home Depot name a year for the calendar year it starts in, so Target’s fiscal 2026 runs to January 30, 2027. The other 20 use the year it ends in. FedEx moved its year end from May 31 to December 31 in 2026 and reports the seven months from June 1 to December 31, 2026 on their own.