Date and time notation in Australia

Date and time notation in Australia [refresh]

Full date	2 January 2025
All-numeric date	02/01/2025
Time	3:46 am

The date and time in Australia are most commonly recorded using the day–month–year format (2 January 2025) and the 12-hour clock (3:46 am), although 24-hour time is used in some cases. For example, some public transport operators such as V/Line^[1] and Transport NSW^[2] use 24-hour time, although others use 12-hour time instead.

Date

Australians typically write the date with the day leading, as in the United Kingdom and New Zealand:

• 2 January 2025
• 02/01/2025

The month–day–year order (January 2, 2025) is sometimes used, often in the mastheads of magazines, schools, newspapers,^[3][4] advertisements, video games, news, and TV shows. Month–day–year in numeric-only form (01/02/2025) is rarely used.

The ISO 8601 date format (2025-01-02) is recommended by the government to be used when communicating internationally.^[5] It is also commonly used in software.

The Australian government identifies Monday as the first day of the week,^[6] which is consistent with the Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) since its October 2021 release.^[7] However, there is disagreement among the general population over whether Monday or Sunday is the first day of the week.^[8]

Weeks are most identified by the last day of the week, either the Friday in business (e.g., "week ending 19/1") or the Sunday in other use (e.g., "week ending 21/1"). Week ending is often abbreviated to "W/E" or "W.E." The first day of the week or the day of an event are sometimes referred to (e.g., "week of 15/1"). Week numbers (as in "the third week of 2007") are not often used, but may appear in some business diaries in numeral-only form (e.g., "3" at the top or bottom of the page). ISO 8601 week notation (e.g. 2025-W01) is not widely understood.^{[citation needed]}

Time

The Australian government recommends using the 12-hour clock (3:46 am), except where the 24-hour clock is more helpful in the context, such as in travel, scientific fields and the military.^[5] The government also recommends a colon as the separator; however, the single period is still used in some contexts.^[5] They also suggest writing the noon/after noon qualifier as "am" or "pm" in lower-case without periods.^[5]

References

1. "Why do you use 24-hour time?". V/Line - Regional public transport for Victoria. Retrieved 24 April 2024.
2. "New South Wales Train Link Timetable for the North Western Region". transportnsw.info. 1 July 2023. Retrieved 5 April 2024.
3. "Latest News". News Corp Australia. Archived from the original on 4 November 2017. Retrieved 4 November 2017.
4. "The West Australian Demo". The West Australian. 16 August 2016. Archived from the original on 1 September 2017. Retrieved 4 November 2017.
5. "Dates and time". Australian Government Style Manual. 17 October 2023.
6. "Dates and time". Australian Government Style Manual. 28 March 2024. Retrieved 27 April 2024.
7. "Unicode CLDR - CLDR 40 Release Note". cldr.unicode.org. 27 October 2021. Retrieved 24 April 2024.
8. Lyons, Gabrielle (17 August 2019). "Sunday Vs Monday: Which day do you consider the start of the week?". ABC News. Retrieved 24 April 2024.