Date formats

Today's date written every common way, and how different countries order day, month and year.

Today in common formats

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Today by country

Rendered by your browser's own locale data (Unicode CLDR).

Country	Short	Long
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Why ISO 8601 wins for anything shared

ISO 8601, first published by the International Organization for Standardization in 1988, orders a date from biggest unit to smallest: year, month, day. That has three practical benefits. Nobody can misread it (there is no country where 2026-03-04 means 3 April). Sorting file names or spreadsheet cells alphabetically also sorts them by date. And it extends cleanly to time and time-zone offsets: 2026-03-04T09:30:00Z.

The same standard defines week dates (2026-W39-7) and ordinal dates (2026-270), both shown in the table above.

Writing dates for people

International audience: 27 September 2026 or Sep 27, 2026, with the month spelled out.
US style guides (AP, Chicago) prefer September 27, 2026; UK guides prefer 27 September 2026 without "th" or commas.
Forms and data: ISO 8601, always with a four-digit year.

Questions people ask

What is the ISO 8601 date format?

YYYY-MM-DD, for example 2026-09-27: four-digit year, two-digit month, two-digit day, separated by hyphens. Times are added after a T, e.g. 2026-09-27T14:30:00+02:00. It is unambiguous in every country and sorts correctly as text.

Is 03/04/2026 March 4 or 3 April?

It depends on who wrote it: 4 March in the US, 3 April in the UK and most of the world. For anything shared internationally, write the month as a word (4 March 2026) or use ISO 8601 (2026-03-04).

Which countries use month-first dates?

Mainly the United States, and it is common in the Philippines and parts of Canada. Most of the world writes day first; China, Japan, Korea, Hungary and Iran write year first.

How do I show today's date in a specific format?

The table above shows today in 14 common formats; tap any value to copy it. For programming, the Unix timestamp converter shows ISO strings too.