Why whereDate() Might Be Killing Your Performance (and How to Fix It)

Ever run a Laravel job that suddenly starts timing out and you’re staring at your SQL wondering why?

That was me debugging a long-running interest calculation job until I spotted the culprit:

->whereDate('created_at', '>=', $from)
->whereDate('created_at', '<=', $to)

WHERE DATE(`created_at`) >= '2024-06-10'
  AND DATE(`created_at`) <= '2024-06-17'

Looks innocent, right? But whereDate() wraps your created_at column in DATE(), which kills your index.

That means MySQL has to scan every row to match, even if your created_at column is indexed.

Even if you’re using Eloquent all through, the moment you use ->whereDate(), it will still scan the whole table, because under the hood it's generating raw SQL like this:

->whereDate('created_at', '>=', $from)

Generates:

WHERE DATE(created_at) >= '2024-06-10'

Which disables the index.

Fix? Use full timestamps instead:

->where('created_at', '>=', $from->startOfDay())
->where('created_at', '<=', $to->endOfDay())

And in raw SQL:

created_at BETWEEN '2024-06-10 00:00:00' AND '2024-06-10 23:59:59'

And does use the index on created_at.

Query that used to timeout now runs in milliseconds — all thanks to index usage.

Small change, big win.