 <p>I'm coming late in the game but I tried all of the solutions above! couldn't get it to drop the zero's in the parameter and give me a default (it ignored the formatting or appeared blank). I was using SSRS 2005 so was struggling with its clunky / buggy issues.</p> <p>My workaround was to add a column to the custom [DimDate] table in my database that I was pulling dates from. I added a column that was a string representation in the desired format of the [date] column. I then created 2 new Datasets in SSRS that pulled in the following queries for 2 defaults for my 'To' &amp; 'From' date defaults -</p> <p>'from'</p> <pre><code> SELECT Datestring FROM dbo.dimDate WHERE [date] = ( SELECT MAX(date) FROM dbo.dimdate WHERE date &lt; DATEADD(month, -3, GETDATE() ) </code></pre> <p>'to'</p> <pre><code> SELECT Datestring FROM dbo.dimDate WHERE [date] = ( SELECT MAX(date) FROM dbo.dimdate WHERE date &lt;= GETDATE() ) </code></pre>