Laravel Eloquent Select Between current month and previous 3 months
Stefan Bogdanescu
Founder & Senior Architect · 2026-06-29
# Mastering Date Ranges in Laravel: Selecting Data Between Current and Previous Months
As developers working with databases, one of the most frequent and frustrating tasks is accurately defining date ranges, especially when dealing with monthly or fiscal periods. You want data for "the last three full months," but standard `whereBetween` queries often introduce subtle bugs by including the current day, which spoils your clean monthly boundaries.
This post will walk you through the correct way to use Laravel's powerful Carbon library to select records precisely between the start and end of specific calendar months, ensuring you get exactly the data you need.
## The Challenge: Why Simple `whereBetween` Fails for Monthly Data
You are trying to select records between "now" and "three months ago." Your initial approach using `$dateS = Carbon::now()->subMonth(3);` and `$dateE = Carbon::now();` combined with `whereBetween('placed_at', [$dateS, $dateE])` is close, but it suffers from a critical flaw: it includes the specific day of the month.
If today is May 15th, your query runs from, for example, February 15th to May 15th. This means you are including data from April and May, but you are also pulling in partial data from February and May, which doesn't align with selecting entire, discrete months.
The goal is not just a time range; the goal is defining specific calendar boundaries (Month Start/End). To achieve this accurately, we must leverage Carbon’s dedicated methods for manipulating month boundaries.
## The Solution: Using `startOfMonth()` and `endOfMonth()`
To fix this, we need to instruct Carbon to strip away all day-level specificity, focusing only on the monthly anchors. This is a common pattern when querying time-series data in Laravel applications.
Here is how you should construct your date boundaries for selecting the last three full months, ending right now:
```php
use Carbon\Carbon;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;
// 1. Define the end point (the current month)
$endDate = Carbon::now();
// 2. Calculate the start point (3 months prior, correctly anchored to the start of the month)
// We want data from the start of the month three months ago up to the end of the current month.
$startDate = $endDate->copy()->subMonths(3)->startOfMonth();
$endDate = $endDate->endOfMonth();
$TotalSpent = DB::table('orders')
->select('total_cost', 'placed_at')
->whereBetween('placed_at', [$startDate, $endDate])
->where(['deleted' => '0', 'delivery_address_id' => $DeliveryAddress->id])
->sum('total_cost');
```
### Step-by-Step Breakdown:
1. **Anchor the Start:** By using `$endDate->copy()->subMonths(3)->startOfMonth()`, we find the exact first day of the month that is three months prior to the current month. For example, if it's May 15th, this correctly lands you on February 1st.
2. **Anchor the End:** By using `$endDate->endOfMonth()`, we ensure the query stops precisely at the last moment of the current calendar month (e.g., May 31st).
This approach guarantees that your `placed_at` column only includes records where the timestamp falls entirely within those calculated monthly boundaries, completely ignoring the day component. This precision is essential for accurate financial reporting and time-series analysis.
## Putting It Together in an Eloquent Context
While the raw query builder method above works perfectly, if you are working with Eloquent models (which is highly recommended for maintainability), you can translate this logic directly into a more object-oriented