SOQL date literals: the complete cheat sheet

Filtering by date is the single most common thing people do in SOQL — and the place where SQL habits break first. SOQL has no GETDATE() or DATEADD(). Instead it ships with date literals: unquoted keywords like TODAY, THIS_QUARTER, and LAST_N_DAYS:30 that Salesforce expands into date ranges for you. This cheat sheet covers every literal, with examples and the gotchas that break queries.

How date literals work

A date literal is written bare — no quotes — wherever a date value would go in a WHERE clause. Salesforce evaluates it at query time, in the time zone of the user running the query:

SELECT Id, Name, Amount, CloseDate
FROM Opportunity
WHERE CloseDate = THIS_QUARTER AND IsClosed = false

Range-style literals like THIS_MONTH match any value inside the range, so = reads as "falls within". You can also compare with <, >, <=, and >= — for example CloseDate > NEXT_WEEK means "after the end of next week".

Fixed-range literals

Rolling-range literals (the :n family)

These take a number after a colon and build a window relative to now:

For example, cases opened in the last 30 days (including today):

SELECT Id, CaseNumber, Subject
FROM Case
WHERE CreatedDate = LAST_N_DAYS:30

Fiscal period literals

Plain THIS_QUARTER is the calendar quarter. If your company's fiscal year is configured in Salesforce Setup, use the fiscal variants to match how your business actually reports:

• LAST_FISCAL_QUARTER / THIS_FISCAL_QUARTER / NEXT_FISCAL_QUARTER
• LAST_FISCAL_YEAR / THIS_FISCAL_YEAR / NEXT_FISCAL_YEAR
• LAST_N_FISCAL_QUARTERS:n / NEXT_N_FISCAL_QUARTERS:n
• LAST_N_FISCAL_YEARS:n / NEXT_N_FISCAL_YEARS:n
• N_FISCAL_QUARTERS_AGO:n / N_FISCAL_YEARS_AGO:n

For example, won revenue so far this fiscal year:

SELECT SUM(Amount)
FROM Opportunity
WHERE IsWon = true AND CloseDate = THIS_FISCAL_YEAR

Absolute dates and datetimes

Literal dates are also written without quotes. Date fields take YYYY-MM-DD:

SELECT Id FROM Opportunity WHERE CloseDate >= 2026-07-01

Datetime fields need a full ISO 8601 value with a time zone — a bare date here is an error:

SELECT Id FROM Case
WHERE CreatedDate >= 2026-06-01T00:00:00Z
  AND CreatedDate < 2026-07-01T00:00:00Z

The half-open pattern above (>= the first of the month, < the first of the next month) is the reliable way to ask "everything in June" against a datetime field.

The gotchas that break date queries

• Never quote a literal. WHERE CloseDate = 'THIS_QUARTER' treats it as a string and fails — literals are keywords, not values.
• Date vs. datetime fields differ. CreatedDate is a datetime, so comparing it to a bare 2026-06-09 is an error. Date literals like TODAY work on both field types, which is one more reason to prefer them.
• LAST_N_DAYS includes today. It runs from midnight n days ago up to the current second. If you want "the 7 days before today, excluding today", you need explicit bounds.
• Weeks follow your locale. THIS_WEEK may start Sunday or Monday depending on the running user's locale settings.
• Quarters are calendar unless you say FISCAL. If your fiscal year starts in February, THIS_QUARTER and THIS_FISCAL_QUARTER return different rows.
• Results depend on the user's time zone. Literals are evaluated in the time zone of whoever runs the query — two users in different time zones can get different rows for TODAY.

Putting it together

Opportunities closing this fiscal quarter, broken down by stage:

SELECT StageName, COUNT(Id), SUM(Amount)
FROM Opportunity
WHERE CloseDate = THIS_FISCAL_QUARTER AND IsClosed = false
GROUP BY StageName

Grouped queries like this one are covered in depth in our guide to SOQL aggregate queries — and if you're translating habits from another database, start with SOQL vs SQL.