<input type="date">

<input> elements of type date create input fields that let the user enter a date, either using a text box that automatically validates the content, or using a special date picker interface. The resulting value includes the year, month, and day, but not the time. The time and datetime-local input types support time and date/time inputs.

The control's UI varies in general from browser to browser; at the moment support is patchy, see Browser compatibility for further details. In unsupported browsers, the control degrades gracefully to a simple <input type="text">.

<input id="date" type="date">

Among browsers that support a custom interface for selecting dates is the Chrome/Opera date control, which looks like so:

The Edge date control looks like this:

The Firefox date control looks like this:

Value

A DOMString representing the value of the date entered into the input. You can set a default value for the input by including a date inside the value attribute, like so:

<input id="date" type="date" value="2017-06-01">

One thing to note is that the displayed date format differs from the actual value — the displayed date format will be chosen based on the set locale of the user's browser, whereas the date value is always formatted yyyy-mm-dd.

You can also get and set the date value in JavaScript using the input element's value property, for example:

var dateControl = document.querySelector('input[type="date"]');
dateControl.value = '2017-06-01';

This code locates the first <input> element whose type is date and sets its value to the date 2017-06-01 (June 1, 2017).

Using date inputs

Date inputs sound convenient at first glance — they provide an easy UI for choosing dates, and they normalize the data format sent to the server, regardless of the user's locale. However, there are issues with <input type="date"> because of the limited browser support.

We'll look at basic and more complex uses of <input type="date">, then offer advice on mitigating the browser support issue later on (see Handling browser support). Of course, hopefully over time browser support will become more ubiquitous, and this problem will fade away.

Basic uses of date

The simplest use of <input type="date"> involves a basic <input> and <label> element combination, as seen below:

<form>
  <div>
    <label for="bday">Enter your birthday:</label>
    <input type="date" id="bday" name="bday">
  </div>
</form>

Setting maximum and minimum dates

You can use the min and max attributes to restrict the dates that can be chosen by the user. In the following example we are setting a minimum date of 2017-04-01 and a maximum date of 2017-04-30:

<form>
  <div>
    <label for="party">Choose your preferred party date:</label>
    <input type="date" id="party" name="party" min="2017-04-01" max="2017-04-30">
  </div>
</form>

The result here is that only days in April of 2017 can be selected — only the "days" part of the text value will be editable, and dates outside April can't be scrolled to in the date picker widget.

Controlling input size

<input type="date"> doesn't support form sizing attributes such as size. You'll have to resort to CSS for sizing needs.

Validation

By default, <input type="date"> does not apply any validation to entered values. The UI implementations generally don't let you enter anything that isn't a date — which is helpful — but you can still leave the field empty or (in browsers where the input falls back to type text) enter an invalid date (e.g. the 32nd of April).

If you use min and max to restrict the available dates (see Setting maximum and minimum dates), supporting browsers will display an error if you try to submit a date that is outside the set bounds. However, you'll have to check the results to be sure the value is within these dates, since they're only enforced if the date picker is fully supported on the user's device.

In addition, you can use the required attribute to make filling in the date mandatory — again, an error will be displayed if you try to submit an empty date field. This, at least, should work in most browsers.

Let's look at an example — here we've set minimum and maximum dates, and also made the field required:

<form>
  <div>
    <label for="party">Choose your preferred party date (required, April 1st to 20th):</label>
    <input type="date" id="party" name="party" min="2017-04-01" max="2017-04-20" required>
    <span class="validity"></span>
  </div>
  <div>
    <input type="submit">
  </div>
</form>

If you try to submit the form with an incomplete date (or with a date outside the set bounds), the browser displays an error. Try playing with the example now:

Here's a screenshot for those of you who aren't using a supporting browser:

Here's the CSS used in the above example. Here we make use of the :valid and :invalid CSS properties to style the input based on whether or not the current value is valid. We had to put the icons on a <span> next to the input, not on the input itself, because in Chrome the generated content is placed inside the form control, and can't be styled or shown effectively.

div {
    margin-bottom: 10px;
    display: flex;
    align-items: center;
}

label {
  display: inline-block;
  width: 300px;
}

input:invalid+span:after {
    content: '✖';
    padding-left: 5px;
}

input:valid+span:after {
    content: '✓';
    padding-left: 5px;
}

Handling browser support

As mentioned above, the major problem with using date inputs at the time of writing is browser support. As an example, the date picker on Firefox for Android looks like this:

Non-supporting browsers gracefully degrade to a text input, but this creates problems both in terms of consistency of user interface (the presented control will be different), and data handling.

The second problem is the more serious of the two; as we mentioned earlier, with a date input, the actual value is always normalized to the format yyyy-mm-dd. With a text input on the other hand, by default the browser has no recognition of what format the date should be in, and there are lots of different ways in which people write dates, for example:

• ddmmyyyy
• dd/mm/yyyy
• mm/dd/yyyy
• dd-mm-yyyy
• mm-dd-yyyy
• Month dd yyyy

One way around this is to put a pattern attribute on your date input. Even though the date input doesn't use it, the text input fallback will. For example, try viewing the following example in a non-supporting browser:

<form>
  <div>
    <label for="bday">Enter your birthday:</label>
    <input type="date" id="bday" name="bday" required pattern="[0-9]{4}-[0-9]{2}-[0-9]{2}">
    <span class="validity"></span>
  </div>
  <div>
    <input type="submit">
  </div>
</form>

If you try submitting it, you'll see that the browser now displays an error message (and highlights the input as invalid) if your entry doesn't match the pattern nnnn-nn-nn, where n is a number from 0 to 9. Of course, this doesn't stop people from entering invalid dates, or incorrectly formatted dates, such as yyyy-dd-mm (whereas we want yyyy-mm-dd). So we still have a problem.

The best way to deal with dates in forms in a cross-browser way at the moment is to get the user to enter the day, month, and year in separate controls (<select> elements being popular; see below for an implementation), or to use a JavaScript library such as jQuery date picker.

Examples

In this example we create two sets of UI elements for choosing dates: a native <input type="date"> picker and a set of three <select> elements for choosing dates in older browsers that don't support the native input.

HTML

The HTML looks like so:

<form>
    <div class="nativeDatePicker">
      <label for="bday">Enter your birthday:</label>
      <input type="date" id="bday" name="bday">
      <span class="validity"></span>
    </div>
    <p class="fallbackLabel">Enter your birthday:</p>
    <div class="fallbackDatePicker">
      <span>
        <label for="day">Day:</label>
        <select id="day" name="day">
        </select>
      </span>
      <span>
        <label for="month">Month:</label>
        <select id="month" name="month">
          <option selected>January</option>
          <option>February</option>
          <option>March</option>
          <option>April</option>
          <option>May</option>
          <option>June</option>
          <option>July</option>
          <option>August</option>
          <option>September</option>
          <option>October</option>
          <option>November</option>
          <option>December</option>
        </select>
      </span>
      <span>
        <label for="year">Year:</label>
        <select id="year" name="year">
        </select>
      </span>
    </div>
</form>

The months are hardcoded (as they are always the same), while the day and year values are dynamically generated depending on the currently selected month and year, and the current year (see the code comments below for detailed explanations of how these functions work.)

JavaScript

The other part of the code that may be of interest is the feature detection code — to detect whether the browser supports <input type="date">, we create a new <input> element, set its type to date, then immediately check what its type is set to — non-supporting browsers will return text, because the date type falls back to type text. If <input type="date"> is not supported, we hide the native picker and show the fallback picker UI (<select>) instead.

// define variables
var nativePicker = document.querySelector('.nativeDatePicker');
var fallbackPicker = document.querySelector('.fallbackDatePicker');
var fallbackLabel = document.querySelector('.fallbackLabel');

var yearSelect = document.querySelector('#year');
var monthSelect = document.querySelector('#month');
var daySelect = document.querySelector('#day');

// hide fallback initially
fallbackPicker.style.display = 'none';
fallbackLabel.style.display = 'none';

// test whether a new date input falls back to a text input or not
var test = document.createElement('input');
test.type = 'date';

// if it does, run the code inside the if() {} block
if(test.type === 'text') {
  // hide the native picker and show the fallback
  nativePicker.style.display = 'none';
  fallbackPicker.style.display = 'block';
  fallbackLabel.style.display = 'block';

  // populate the days and years dynamically
  // (the months are always the same, therefore hardcoded)
  populateDays(monthSelect.value);
  populateYears();
}

function populateDays(month) {
  // delete the current set of <option> elements out of the
  // day <select>, ready for the next set to be injected
  while(daySelect.firstChild){
    daySelect.removeChild(daySelect.firstChild);
  }

  // Create variable to hold new number of days to inject
  var dayNum;

  // 31 or 30 days?
  if(month === 'January' || month === 'March' || month === 'May' || month === 'July' || month === 'August' || month === 'October' || month === 'December') {
    dayNum = 31;
  } else if(month === 'April' || month === 'June' || month === 'September' || month === 'November') {
    dayNum = 30;
  } else {
  // If month is February, calculate whether it is a leap year or not
    var year = yearSelect.value;
    (year - 2016) % 4 === 0 ? dayNum = 29 : dayNum = 28;
  }

  // inject the right number of new <option> elements into the day <select>
  for(i = 1; i <= dayNum; i++) {
    var option = document.createElement('option');
    option.textContent = i;
    daySelect.appendChild(option);
  }

  // if previous day has already been set, set daySelect's value
  // to that day, to avoid the day jumping back to 1 when you
  // change the year
  if(previousDay) {
    daySelect.value = previousDay;

    // If the previous day was set to a high number, say 31, and then
    // you chose a month with less total days in it (e.g. February),
    // this part of the code ensures that the highest day available
    // is selected, rather than showing a blank daySelect
    if(daySelect.value === "") {
      daySelect.value = previousDay - 1;
    }

    if(daySelect.value === "") {
      daySelect.value = previousDay - 2;
    }

    if(daySelect.value === "") {
      daySelect.value = previousDay - 3;
    }
  }
}

function populateYears() {
  // get this year as a number
  var date = new Date();
  var year = date.getFullYear();

  // Make this year, and the 100 years before it available in the year <select>
  for(var i = 0; i <= 100; i++) {
    var option = document.createElement('option');
    option.textContent = year-i;
    yearSelect.appendChild(option);
  }
}

// when the month or year <select> values are changed, rerun populateDays()
// in case the change affected the number of available days
yearSelect.onchange = function() {
  populateDays(monthSelect.value);
}

monthSelect.onchange = function() {
  populateDays(monthSelect.value);
}

//preserve day selection
var previousDay;

// update what day has been set to previously
// see end of populateDays() for usage
daySelect.onchange = function() {
  previousDay = daySelect.value;
}

Specifications

Browser compatibility

[1] It is recognized but there is no UI.

See also

• The generic <input> element and the interface used to manipulate it, HTMLInputElement
• Date and Time picker tutorial