Date and time notation in the Philippines
Date and time notation in the Philippines varies across the country in various, customary formats. Some government agencies in the Philippines have adopted time and date representation standard based on the ISO 8601, notably the Philippines driver's license and the Unified Multi-Purpose ID.
Date
In casual settings, as a legacy of American rule in the early 20th century, alphanumeric date formats are usually written with a middle-endian order in a way similar to that of the United States and has since become the de facto standard in the country. Another format, the little-endian order, similar way to that of United Kingdom, is applied primarily by the military and the police, although it is also used for more formal civil uses such as government memorandums, a number of tertiary-level educational institutions such as the University of the Philippines system, and business databases for companies that do not deal with East Asian or North American clients. Other minor applications of the little-endian format include certificates, plaques, trophies and expiration dates.There is no law mandating the date order, minimum or maximum length, or format, and notations sometimes vary from office to office, in private and public sectors. For example, passports issued by the Department of Foreign Affairs, which particularly notates the date alphanumerically as DD-MMM-YYYY as are the arrival and departure inked passport stamps issued by the Bureau of Immigration as of 2924, legislative bills and executive orders are dated alphanumerically with a MMMM-DD-YYYY format. Dates on cheques Issued after May 1, 2024 are required to be written in the MM-DD-YYYY format.
The big-endian order format is very hardly encountered and has its very own niche use in the country, including and especially those needing compliance to the ISO 8601 standard. In practice, driver's license issued by the Land Transportation Office and the UMID issued by the Social Security System, Government Service Insurance System, Philippine Health Insurance Corporation, and Home Development Mutual Fund uses the ISO 8601 standard and notates the date numerically as YYYY-MM-DD.
The little-endian date format is always written alphanumerically by default to avoid confusion.
The forward slash is the most common separator for a numeric date format. The use of hyphen was formerly ubiquitous but has since been seldomly encountered, while periods were once quite seldomly used but are now almost exclusively used for expiration dates that are normally written in the alphanumeric day-month-year format. On the other hand, an alphanumeric date in month-day-year format instead uses a comma and spacing between the day and year. The day-month-year variant does not need a comma between the month and year.
Below are date format variations typically used in the Philippines:
| Format | Order | Current date |
| Alphanumeric | MMM-DD-YYYY | |
| Alphanumeric | MMM-D-YYYY | |
| Alphanumeric | DD-MMM-YYYY | |
| Alphanumeric | D-MMM-YYYY | |
| Numeric | MM-DD-YYYY | |
| Numeric | M-D-YYYY | |
| Numeric | MM-DD-YY |
Standard:, or month day, year. Is the most common date format being use by the Filipino people in general.
The following date format variations are less commonly or seldomly used:
| Format | Order | Example |
| Numeric | M-D-YY | |
| Numeric | DD-MM-YYYY | |
| Numeric | D-M-YYYY | |
| Numeric | DD-MM-YY | |
| Numeric | D-M-YY | |
| Numeric | YYYY-MM-DD |
In Tagalog and all other Philippine languages, however, the day-month-year notation is the format as adapted from the Spanish. The ordinal prefix ika is applied on the day first as in ika-.
Time
The Philippines uses the 12-hour clock format in most oral or written communication, whether formal or informal. A colon is used to separate the hour from the minutes. The use of the 24-hour clock is usually restricted in use among airports, the military, police, and other technical purposes.Spoken conventions
Numerical elements of dates and the time may pronounced using either their Spanish names or vernacular ones; the former is somewhat pedestrian while the latter tends to be longer, formal and academic.Examples:
Date: 1 April 2022
- Spanish-derived: Abril uno/primero, dos mil bente-dos or uno ng Abril, dos mil bente-dos
- English: 'April one, twenty twenty-two' or 'April one, two thousand twenty-two'
- Tagalog: Ika-isa ng Abril, dalawang libo dalawampu't dalawa or Abril isa, dalawang libo dalawampu't dalawa
- Spanish-derived: Alas otso y med'ya/mediya ng gabi
- English: 'Eight Thirty ' or 'half past eight '
- Tagalog: Tatlumpu makalipas ikawalo or walo at tatlumpu ng gabi or walo at kalahati ng gabi