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Date Format by Country

Which way round a country writes a date — day/month/year, month/day/year or year/month/day — with the pattern, a live sample and the clock it uses. Search by country, code, alias (usa, uk, holland) or by the order itself (mdy). Under it, the named formats — ISO 8601, RFC 3339, epoch, SQL DATETIME — with the pattern behind each one.

DMY 170 countriesMDY 9 countriesYMD 15 countries
194 of 194 countries, 6 pinned
★ pins a country to the top of the table.
PinnedCountryCodeRegionOrderPatternSampleClock
AustraliaAUOceaniaDMY12h1:45 pm
ChinaCNAsiaYMD24h13:45
IndiaINAsiaDMY12h1:45 pm
New ZealandNZOceaniaDMY12h1:45 pm
United KingdomGBEuropeDMY24h13:45
United StatesThe one major country that leads with the month — the source of most 03/04 ambiguity.USAmericasMDY12h1:45 PM
AfghanistanSolar Hijri calendar in civil use.AFAsiaYMDCLDR fa-AF → MDY24h13:45
AlbaniaALEuropeDMY12h1:45 m.d.
AlgeriaDZAfricaDMY12h1:45 م
AngolaAOAfricaDMY24h13:45
Antigua & BarbudaAGAmericasDMY12h1:45 pm
ArgentinaARAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
ArmeniaAMAsiaDMY24h13:45
AustriaATEuropeDMY24h13:45
AzerbaijanAZAsiaDMY24h13:45
BahamasBSAmericasDMY12h1:45 pm
BahrainBHAsiaDMY12h1:45 م
BangladeshBDAsiaDMY12h1:45 PM
BarbadosBBAmericasDMY12h1:45 pm
BelarusBYEuropeDMY24h13:45
BelgiumBEEuropeDMY24h13:45
BelizeBZAmericasMDYalso DMYCLDR en-BZ → DMY24h13:45
BeninBJAfricaDMY24h13:45
BhutanBTAsiaYMD12hཆུ་ཚོད་ 1 སྐར་མ་ 45 ཕྱི་ཆ་
BoliviaBOAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
Bosnia & HerzegovinaBAEuropeDMY24h13:45
BotswanaBWAfricaDMY24h13:45
BrazilBRAmericasDMY24h13:45
BruneiBNAsiaDMY12h1:45 PTG
BulgariaBGEuropeDMY24h13:45
Burkina FasoBFAfricaDMY24h13:45
BurundiBIAfricaDMY24h13:45
Cabo VerdeCVAfricaDMY24h13:45
CambodiaKHAsiaDMY12h1:45 PM
CameroonCMAfricaDMY24h13:45
CanadaAll three orders are in daily use; the federal standard is YMD (ISO 8601), French Canada writes DMY.CAAmericasYMDalso DMY, MDY12h1:45 p.m.
Central African RepublicCFAfricaDMY24h13:45
ChadTDAfricaDMY12h1:45 PM
ChileCLAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
ColombiaCOAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
ComorosKMAfricaDMY24h13:45
Congo - BrazzavilleCGAfricaDMY24h13:45
Congo - KinshasaCDAfricaDMY24h13:45
Costa RicaCRAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
Côte d'IvoireCIAfricaDMY24h13:45
CroatiaHREuropeDMY24h13:45
CubaCUAmericasDMY12h1:45 p.m.
CyprusCYEuropeDMY12h1:45 μ.μ.
CzechiaCZEuropeDMY24h13:45
DenmarkDKEuropeDMY24h13.45
DjiboutiDJAfricaDMY12h1:45 PM
DominicaDMAmericasDMY12h1:45 pm
Dominican RepublicDOAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
EcuadorECAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
EgyptEGAfricaDMY12h1:45 م
El SalvadorSVAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
Equatorial GuineaGQAfricaDMY24h13:45
EritreaERAfricaDMYCLDR ti-ER → MDY12h1:45 ድ.ቀ.
EstoniaEEEuropeDMY24h13:45
EswatiniSZAfricaDMY12h1:45 pm
EthiopiaThe Ethiopian calendar runs 7–8 years behind the Gregorian one.ETAfricaDMY12h1:45 ከሰዓት
FijiFJOceaniaDMY12h1:45 pm
FinlandFIEuropeDMY24h13.45
FranceFREuropeDMY24h13:45
GabonGAAfricaDMY24h13:45
GambiaGMAfricaDMY12h1:45 pm
GeorgiaGEAsiaDMY24h13:45
GermanyDEEuropeDMY24h13:45
GhanaGHAfricaDMY12h1:45 pm
GreeceGREuropeDMY12h1:45 μ.μ.
GrenadaGDAmericasDMY12h1:45 pm
GuamA US territory, and it writes dates the US way.GUOceaniaMDY12h1:45 PM
GuatemalaGTAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
GuineaGNAfricaDMY24h13:45
Guinea-BissauGWAfricaDMY24h13:45
GuyanaGYAmericasDMY12h1:45 pm
HaitiHTAmericasDMY24h13:45
HondurasHNAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
Hong KongEnglish writes DMY, Chinese writes YMD.HKAsiaDMYalso YMD12h下午1:45
HungaryWritten with trailing dots: 2026. 12. 31.HUEuropeYMD24h13:45
IcelandISEuropeDMY24h13:45
IndonesiaIDAsiaDMY24h13.45
IranSolar Hijri calendar in civil use.IRAsiaYMD24h13:45
IraqIQAsiaDMY12h1:45 م
IrelandIEEuropeDMY24h13:45
IsraelILAsiaDMY24h13:45
ItalyITEuropeDMY24h13:45
JamaicaJMAmericasDMY12h1:45 pm
JapanEra years (Reiwa 8) are still used on official forms.JPAsiaYMD24h13:45
JordanJOAsiaDMY12h1:45 م
KazakhstanKZAsiaDMY24h13:45
KenyaKEAfricaDMY24h13:45
KiribatiKIOceaniaDMY12h1:45 pm
KuwaitKWAsiaDMY12h1:45 م
KyrgyzstanKGAsiaDMY24h13:45
LaosLAAsiaDMY24h13:45
LatviaLVEuropeDMY24h13:45
LebanonLBAsiaDMY12h1:45 م
LesothoLSAfricaDMY12h1:45 pm
LiberiaLRAfricaDMY12h1:45 pm
LibyaLYAfricaDMY12h1:45 م
LithuaniaLTEuropeYMD24h13:45
LuxembourgLUEuropeDMY24h13:45
MacauMOAsiaDMYalso YMD12h下午1:45
MadagascarMGAfricaDMY24h13:45
MalawiMWAfricaDMY12h1:45 pm
MalaysiaMYAsiaDMY12h1:45 PTG
MaldivesMVAsiaDMY24h13:45
MaliMLAfricaDMY24h13:45
MaltaMTEuropeDMY24h13:45
Marshall IslandsMHOceaniaMDY12h1:45 PM
MauritaniaMRAfricaDMY12h1:45 م
MauritiusMUAfricaDMY24h13:45
MexicoMXAmericasDMY12h1:45 p.m.
MicronesiaFMOceaniaMDYCLDR en-FM → DMY12h1:45 pm
MoldovaMDEuropeDMY24h13:45
MongoliaMNAsiaYMD24h13:45
MontenegroMEEuropeDMY24h13:45
MoroccoMAAfricaDMY24h13:45
MozambiqueMZAfricaDMY24h13:45
MyanmarMMAsiaDMY24h13:45
NamibiaNAAfricaDMY12h1:45 pm
NepalOfficial dates use the Bikram Sambat calendar, about 57 years ahead.NPAsiaYMD24h13:45
NetherlandsNLEuropeDMY24h13:45
NicaraguaNIAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
NigerNEAfricaDMY24h13:45
NigeriaNGAfricaDMY24h13:45
North KoreaKPAsiaYMD12h오후 1:45
North MacedoniaMKEuropeDMY24h13:45
NorwayNOEuropeDMY24h13:45
OmanOMAsiaDMY12h1:45 م
PakistanPKAsiaDMY12h1:45 PM
PalauPWOceaniaMDYCLDR en-PW → DMY12h1:45 pm
PalestinePSAsiaDMY12h1:45 م
PanamaLong US influence left MDY in everyday use alongside DMY.PAAmericasMDYalso DMY12h1:45 p. m.
Papua New GuineaPGOceaniaDMY12h1:45 pm
ParaguayPYAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
PeruPEAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
PhilippinesMDY in everyday use; government and military forms use DMY.PHAsiaMDYalso DMY12h1:45 PM
PolandPLEuropeDMY24h13:45
PortugalPTEuropeDMY24h13:45
Puerto RicoA US territory, and it writes dates the US way.PRAmericasMDY12h1:45 p. m.
QatarQAAsiaDMY12h1:45 م
RomaniaROEuropeDMY24h13:45
RussiaRUEuropeDMY24h13:45
RwandaRWAfricaDMYCLDR rw-RW → YMD24h13:45
SamoaWSOceaniaDMY12h1:45 pm
São Tomé & PríncipeSTAfricaDMY24h13:45
Saudi ArabiaThe Hijri calendar sits alongside the Gregorian one on official documents.SAAsiaDMY12h1:45 م
SenegalSNAfricaDMY24h13:45
SerbiaRSEuropeDMY24h13:45
SeychellesSCAfricaDMY24h13:45
Sierra LeoneSLAfricaDMY12h1:45 pm
SingaporeSGAsiaDMY12h1:45 pm
SlovakiaSKEuropeDMY24h13:45
SloveniaSIEuropeDMY24h13:45
Solomon IslandsSBOceaniaDMY12h1:45 pm
SomaliaSOAfricaDMY12h1:45 GD
South AfricaYMD is the official written form; DMY is common in speech and on forms.ZAAfricaYMDalso DMY24h13:45
South KoreaKRAsiaYMD12h오후 1:45
South SudanSSAfricaDMY12h1:45 pm
SpainESEuropeDMY24h13:45
Sri LankaLKAsiaDMYCLDR si-LK → YMD24h13.45
St. Kitts & NevisKNAmericasDMY12h1:45 pm
St. LuciaLCAmericasDMY12h1:45 pm
St. Vincent & GrenadinesVCAmericasDMY12h1:45 pm
SudanSDAfricaDMY12h1:45 م
SurinameSRAmericasDMY24h13:45
SwedenYMD with hyphens is the national standard and matches ISO 8601.SEEuropeYMDalso DMY24h13:45
SwitzerlandCHEuropeDMY24h13:45
SyriaSYAsiaDMY12h1:45 م
TaiwanMinguo (ROC) era years — 2026 is year 115 — appear on official documents.TWAsiaYMD12h下午1:45
TajikistanTJAsiaDMY24h13:45
TanzaniaTZAfricaDMY24h13:45
ThailandBuddhist era years — 2026 is 2569 — are standard in civil use.THAsiaDMY24h13:45
Timor-LesteTLAsiaDMY24h13:45
TogoTGAfricaDMY24h13:45
TongaTOOceaniaDMY12h1:45 pm
Trinidad & TobagoTTAmericasDMY12h1:45 pm
TunisiaTNAfricaDMY12h1:45 م
TürkiyeTREuropeDMY24h13:45
TurkmenistanTMAsiaDMY24h13:45
TuvaluTVOceaniaDMY24h13:45
UgandaUGAfricaDMY24h13:45
UkraineUAEuropeDMY24h13:45
United Arab EmiratesAEAsiaDMY12h1:45 م
UruguayUYAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
UzbekistanUZAsiaDMY24h13:45
VanuatuVUOceaniaDMY12h1:45 pm
VenezuelaVEAmericasDMY12h1:45 p. m.
VietnamVNAsiaDMY24h13:45
YemenYEAsiaDMY12h1:45 م
ZambiaZMAfricaDMY12h1:45 pm
ZimbabweZWAfricaDMY24h13:45

DMY 31/12/2026 · MDY 12/31/2026 · YMD 2026-12-31. Only YMD sorts correctly as text, and only 2026-12-31 (ISO 8601) is unambiguous everywhere.

Patterns and samples come from the browser's own CLDR data via Intl.DateTimeFormat, so they track the platform rather than a hand-written table. Every row is rendered in the Gregorian calendar with Latin digits so the orders can be compared side by side; countries whose civil calendar differs say so under their name.

A CLDR line under an order means the locale data disagrees with what the country actually writes — the badge is the everyday answer, the CLDR line is what software formatting for that locale will emit.

Common formats and their names

The other half of the question: you are holding 2026-12-31 12:34:56 — what is it called, and what do you ask a date library for to get it back? Every row below is the same instant, written the way that format writes it.

Interchange

Written to be read by something at the other end. Fixed shapes, defined by a standard, the same in every country.

NamePatternSample written this way
ISO 8601 dateThe only date form that is unambiguous everywhere, and the only one that sorts correctly as plain text.
ISO 8601 date and time (UTC)The T separates the date from the time; the Z says UTC, and is read aloud as “Zulu”.
ISO 8601 with millisecondsWhat JavaScript's toISOString() emits, and what most JSON APIs carry timestamps as.
RFC 3339 (offset form)The profile of ISO 8601 that internet protocols and JSON Schema's date-time point at. The offset is the writer's own, so +00:00 here only because every row is rendered in UTC.
ISO 8601 basic (no separators)The same instant with the punctuation dropped, so it survives a filename, an id or a URL untouched.
ISO week dateWeek of the year, then the day within it (1 = Monday). The week-year can differ from the calendar year at the turn — 2027-01-01 is 2026-W53-5. The ISO week fields are their own tokens: yyyy-'W'ww-e is the locale's week rules, which are not ISO's everywhere.
ISO ordinal dateDay of the year, 001 to 366. Manufacturing and aviation call it a Julian date, which it is not.
RFC 5322 / 2822 (email)The Date: header of every email. The day and month names are English by specification, whatever language the message is in.
HTTP-date (IMF-fixdate)Last-Modified, Expires, Date and If-Modified-Since. RFC 9110 requires GMT and English names — never a local offset.

Stored & logged

The shapes that turn up in databases, filenames and log lines — conventions rather than standards, but ones everybody follows.

NamePatternSample written this way
SQL DATETIMEMySQL, Postgres and SQLite text form: ISO order, a space instead of the T, and no zone at all — which is what makes a DATETIME column ambiguous unless everything writing to it agrees on one.
Unix time (epoch seconds)Ten digits until 2286. A bare integer has no zone to get wrong, which is why it is what most systems store.
Unix time (milliseconds)Thirteen digits, and what JavaScript's Date.now() returns. Feed one to a seconds-based parser and you land in the year 58000.
Excel serialWhat a spreadsheet holds behind a formatted cell; the fraction is the time of day. Excel's 1900 leap-year bug is why the epoch is the 30th rather than the 31st. A sample before 1900 has no serial at all — the negative number is arithmetic, not something a spreadsheet accepts.
Compact datePartition keys, table suffixes, folder names, batch ids. Still sorts correctly, and fits where a hyphen is not welcome.
Filename timestampBackups, exports and release artefacts. No colons, because Windows will not have them in a filename.
Common Log FormatThe timestamp inside the brackets of an Apache or nginx access line — the colon after the year is the giveaway.
JavaScript Date stringWhat a Date prints when it is concatenated into a string by accident — the spelled-out zone in brackets is the giveaway. Recognise it, then go and find the toISOString() that should have been there.

Written for people

Locale-dependent by design. Shown here in English so the shapes line up; the country table above is where each place's own version lives.

NamePatternSample written this way
Long date (British)Letters instead of numbers, so the order cannot be misread. The safest thing to print on something a human signs.
Long date (American)The same date with the month first and commas around the day — the US long form.
Medium dateShort enough for a table cell and still unambiguous, because the month is a word. A good default for a UI.
Short date (DMY)Most of the world. Indistinguishable from the row below for any day of the month under 13 — the whole reason the country table exists.
Short date (MDY)The United States, unpadded as Americans actually write it. Never send this to anyone outside it.
24-hour timeMidnight is 00:00. Drop the seconds for anything a person reads off a screen.
12-hour timeNoon is 12 pm and midnight is 12 am, which is why schedules say “midday” and contracts say 11:59 pm.
Month and yearReport titles, invoice periods, chart axes — everything where the day is noise.

Every row is rendered in UTC with English month and day names. For the email and HTTP rows that is the specification, not a simplification — both are English and GMT whoever writes them. For the rest it keeps the shapes comparable; the country table above is where each place's own version lives.

Patterns are LDML tokens, which is what date-fns, Day.js (with the advanced-format plugin), Java's DateTimeFormatter and ICU all take — spelled the way date-fns accepts them, so the ISO week row uses its RRRR/II/i rather than the locale's week fields, which Java reaches through WeekFields.ISO. PHP's date() and Python's strftime spell every field differently — Y-m-d H:i:s and %Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S for the SQL row.

Instructions

A lookup for the question behind most date bugs: is 03/04 the 3rd of April or the 4th of March? Find a country and read the order it writes — then name the shape you are holding in the table of common formats below it.

  1. Type in the search box — a country, an ISO code, an everyday alias (usa, uk, holland) or an order (dmy).
  2. Narrow with the order and region chips. Terms combine, so asia ymd is Asian countries that lead with the year.
  3. Click the ★ beside a country to pin it to the top of the table. The pins are remembered.
  4. Click any Pattern or Sample cell to copy it.
  5. Under the table, Common formats and their names lists the named shapes — ISO 8601, RFC 3339, epoch, SQL DATETIME — each with the pattern that produces it. Paste a timestamp into Name a timestamp to have it identified.

Tips

  • Pinned countries stay on top through a search too, so a pinned country that matches is never buried. The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, China, New Zealand and India start pinned — unpin any of them, or Clear all, and the table goes back to plain alphabetical.
  • Change Sample date to see a date you actually care about written every way round. The default, 31 December, is picked so the day cannot be mistaken for a month.
  • Search matches word starts, so ger finds Germany and us finds the United States without dragging in every country that happens to contain those letters.
  • also DMY under an order means more than one form is in real use — Canada writes all three, the Philippines writes MDY day to day but DMY on government forms.
  • The Clock column is the everyday convention, not a rule: plenty of 12-hour countries write 24-hour time on timetables and in software.
  • Name a timestamp matches on shape, not by parsing: digits where digits go, letters where letters go. That is what places Tue, 01 Sep 2026 12:34:56 +0000 as an email date without knowing which month Sep is — and why a truncated paste matches nothing.
  • The named formats are all rendered in UTC, and Sample time sets the time of day they show. The country table keeps its own fixed time: it compares the order of the date fields, which a time has nothing to say about.
  • Nothing here leaves the browser, and the sibling DateTime page converts an actual timestamp between formats.
  • Hit Example and click either the search box, to run the usa lookup, or Name a timestamp, to identify 2026-09-01 12:34:56.