The question about what year is the actual start of a new decade came up this week so, of course, I Googled it. What I found out is, there is no definitive answer.
According to Wikipedia, a decade is a period of 10 years. "Any period of ten years is a "decade", and there is no "official" legal nor administrative start or end point, so it can be any arbitrary span of ten years. There are two main methods of counting decades in recognition. The first method, counting ordinally, counts decades starting with the first year 1 CE (For example, the years 1981–1990 is referred to as the 199th decade or the 9th decade of the 20th century), while the other, counting cardinally, groups years based on having the same digits (For example, the years 1980–1989 is referred to as the 1980s, or commonly known as the eighties)." A poll of Americans say the majority go with the cardinal range.
There are also a few Reddit threads about this topic. This example makes sense, "...when we talk about a new decade, we are usually referring to the digit in the “10” place changing. So for instance, 2010->2020. In the exact same way, when we talk about a new century, that usually means the digit in the “100” place changing, so 2000->2100.
timeanddate.com says, "Decades... are commonly categorized based on the year numbers. For example, we say 'the eighties' instead of 'the 199th decade.' According to this common definition, decades generally encompass the time span from years ending with 0 to years ending with 9, such as 2020 – 2029.”
Conclusion, personally I think of a new decade on the 0 not the 1, so 2020 - 2029, makes the most sense to me. What do you think? Let us know.
(Photo: Getty Images)