Date and time notation in Europe

The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) adopted ISO 8601 with EN 28601, now EN ISO 8601. As a European Norm, CEN and CENELEC member states are obligated to adopt the standard as national standard without alterations as well.

Except for Austria, Germany and Switzerland, see the navigation box on the bottom to find individual articles per country.

In most Post-Soviet states DD.MM.YYYY format is used with dot as a separator.

24-hour time notation is used officially and for purposes that require precision like announcements in the media. In colloquial speech, a 12-hour clock is used.

The traditional all-numeric form of writing Gregorian dates in German is the little-endian day.month.year order, using a dot on the line (period or full stop) as the separator (e.g., “31.12.1991” or “15.4.74”). Years could be written with two or four digits; the century was sometimes seen being replaced by an apostrophe: “31.12.’91”; however, two-digit years are generally deprecated after the Millennium. Numbers may be written with or without leading zero in Austria or Switzerland, where they are commonly only discarded in days when literal months are being used (e.g., “09.11.”, but “9. November”). German grammar rules do not allow for leading zeros in dates at all, and there should always be a space after a dot. However, leading zeros were allowed according to machine writing standards if they helped aligning dates. The use of a dot as a separator matches the convention of pronouncing the day and the month as an ordinal number, because ordinal numbers are written in German followed by a dot.

Besides that, in Hungary the big-endian year-month-day order, has been traditionally used. In 1995, also in Germany, the traditional notation was replaced in the DIN 5008 standard, which defines common typographic conventions, with the ISO 8601 notation (e.g., “1991-12-31”), and becoming the prescribed date format in Germany since 1996-05-01. The latter is beginning to become more popular, especially in IT-related work and international projects. Since portions of the population continued to use the old format, the traditional format was re-introduced as alternative to the standard yyyy-mm-dd format to DIN 5008 in 2001 and DIN ISO 8601 in September 2006 but its usage is restricted to contexts where misinterpretation cannot occur. The expanded form of the date (e.g., “31. Dezember 1991”) continues to use the little-endian order and the ordinal-number dot for the day of the month.

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