How to Calculate Nth Day of the Week in Month on Shortcuts

by Rian

Shortcuts app on iOS and macOS is one of the most powerful tool available to the platform. I strongly recommend anyone who owns an Apple device to give Shortcuts a try; it is equivalent of BASIC in our time. But not every functions a user would want is in the Shortcuts. Thankfully, what Shortcuts doesn’t provide can be made by a user.

In this particular case, I rewrote one of my old shortcut I have been using as a utility function. As the name implies, “Nth day of the week in Month” is to find a certain day of the week in a month. For example, Thanksgiving in America is celebrated on fourth Thursday of November. Thanksgiving is a holiday marked on most calendars, but if you are looking for more arbitrary day of the week, say, third Saturday of October, you need a separate shortcut for that.

1. Download the shortcut through the link.
2. The shortcut takes a dictionary value such as \{"date": "somedate", "nth": N, "day": M}, where somedate is the target month in date format (e.g. pass 11/1/25 for November 2025), N for the occurrence, and M for the day (starting from Sunday at value 1) of the week.

Following example would return 11/27/25:

\{"date": "11/1/25", "nth": 4, "day": 5}

In case you want to make your own shortcut by yourself, I’ve used a simple formula to calculate when the target day of the week would happen. Essentially, I’ve only repackaged the formula into a shortcut so that it can be called from other shortcuts at ease.