forgive me but the answers above will be fine for this year but if you want a date in the past year using YEAR(NOW()), will give the wrong answer. its its June now, how do I get the date 6 months ago? ? One answer is : use the apache commons lang time library adding this to a jasper report was a difficult and awkward as the rest of jaspersoft and when you finally get it installed, guess what the expressions editor (which has a font that is too small to read) does not give you any intellisence on the classes/methods available, super helpful TIBCO NOT! then you can add a negative amount of months to get desired result. new SimpleDateFormat("MMM").format(DateUtils.addMonths(NOW(), -6))