Performant index on date field

Is there a way to get a good performing index on a date field? I have tried various date property indexes and the query plan is always in a pretty high range. Below are query plan result values I have observed:

   StartDate > '2019-12-01'  --cost = 699168
   StartDate = '2019-12-21'  --cost 70666
   StartDate between '2019-12-21' and '2019-21-28' --cost = 492058

The query plans above were for type %TimeStamp.