UK census dates

National censuses have been held in the United Kingdom every ten years since 1801, but only those from 1841 onwards are useful to genealogists. The most recent census to be released to the public is the 1911. You can't generally rely on people in the nineteenth century to give (or even know) their exact age, but sometimes knowing the exact date of the censuses can help calculate an ancestor's birthday. The dates of the available UK censuses are:

1841 census: 6 June
1851 census: 30 March
1861 census: 7 April
1871 census: 2 April
1881 census: 3 April
1891 census: 5 April
1901 census: 31 March
1911 census: 2 April

I had been thinking about writing my own tool to calculate the possible range of birth dates from stated age and census date, but then I found this downloadable calculator tool—it even does the right thing with the 1841 census (where adults' age is generally rounded down to the lower 5 years).

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