Back to Your pregnancy and baby guide. All pregnant women in England are offered an ultrasound scan at around 8 to 14 weeks of pregnancy. This is called the dating scan. It’s used to see how far along in your pregnancy you are and check your baby’s development. Your midwife or doctor will book you a dating scan appointment. It will usually take place at your local hospital ultrasound department.

Pregnancy dating with ultrasound is best done in the first trimester, at around 11 to 13 weeks. Scans done at this point have the highest degree of accuracy in.

You can calculate your due date by subtracting three months from the first day of your last menstrual period LMP and then add a week. Use our pregnancy calculator. A pregnancy is based on being days long, which is 40 weeks more like 10 months not 9! When we give you a due date we consider 37 to 42 weeks to be full-term, so even if your baby is born two weeks before your due date it is not considered premature.

Because few women know the exact day they ovulated or conceived, an ultrasound done in the first trimester of pregnancy has been shown to the be the most accurate way to date a pregnancy. If an ultrasound date in the first trimester differs from your LMP date by seven days or more, we would go with the ultrasound. Ultrasounds done later in the pregnancy are less accurate for dating , so if your due date is set in the first trimester, it shouldn’t be changed. However, if you did not get a first trimester ultrasound for dating and an ultrasound done to look at the baby’s anatomy usually at weeks of pregnancy differs from your LMP date by 10 to 14 days, we would change your date to the ultrasound estimate.