You can use the MONTH() function in MySQL to return the month from a date.

In this context, the month is a value between 1 and 12 (or 0 for dates with a zero month part).

For example, if you provide a date of 2018-10-07, the MONTH() function will return 10.

Syntax

The syntax goes like this:

MONTH(date)

Where date is the date value that you want the month returned from.

Example

Here’s an example to demonstrate.

SELECT MONTH('2020-12-18') AS 'Result';

Result:

+--------+
| Result |
+--------+
|     12 |
+--------+

If the month part has a leading zero, the leading zero is omitted from the result. Example:

SELECT MONTH('2020-07-18') AS 'Result';

Result:

+--------+
| Result |
+--------+
|      7 |
+--------+

A Database Example

In this example, I extract the month part from a column when running a query against a database.

USE sakila;
SELECT
  payment_date AS 'Date/Time',
  MONTH(payment_date) AS 'Month'
FROM payment
WHERE payment_id = 1;

Result:

+---------------------+-------+
| Date/Time           | Month |
+---------------------+-------+
| 2005-05-25 11:30:37 |     5 |
+---------------------+-------+

Current Date/Time

Here’s an example of extracting the month part from the current date and time (which is returned using the NOW() function).

SELECT 
    NOW(),
    MONTH(NOW());

Result:

+---------------------+--------------+
| NOW()               | MONTH(NOW()) |
+---------------------+--------------+
| 2018-06-29 14:44:38 |            6 |
+---------------------+--------------+

Another way to do this is to use the CURDATE() function, which returns only the date (but not the time).

SELECT 
    CURDATE(),
    MONTH(CURDATE());    

Result:

+------------+------------------+
| CURDATE()  | MONTH(CURDATE()) |
+------------+------------------+
| 2018-06-29 |                6 |
+------------+------------------+