The date in MLA format follows a single rule across every place a date appears: day first, then month, then year, with no commas (12 March 2024). Months longer than four letters use an abbreviation (Jan., Feb., Mar., Apr., Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., Dec.), and the four-letter months (May, June, July) are spelled out. The same format governs the heading on the first page, the works cited entries, and any date inside the prose. This page collects worked examples for every place a date in MLA format appears, plus the formatting choices that lose marks on otherwise clean papers.
The MLA Date Format Rule
MLA uses the day-month-year order in every context, which makes it different from APA (year-first in references, month-day-year in prose) and Chicago (month-day-year in prose, day-month-year in some bibliography entries). The order is the same whether the date appears in the first-page heading, the works cited page, the in-text citation, or the prose itself.
Standard pattern: 12 March 2024.
Abbreviated pattern: 12 Mar. 2024 (used in works cited entries).
No commas, no ordinals. Not "March 12th, 2024" and not "March 12, 2024".
Year-only when the day is unknown: 2024.
The day-month-year order has one practical advantage that explains why MLA chose it: it puts the most variable element (the day) first and the most stable element (the year) last, which makes lists of dates easy to scan when sorted by month or year.
Date in the MLA First-Page Heading
An MLA paper has no separate cover page (unless the instructor requests one). Instead, a four-line heading appears in the upper-left corner of the first page, double-spaced, flush left:
Marisol Reyes
Professor Tanaka
English 102, Section 4
12 March 2024
The fourth line is the submission date in full day-month-year format with no abbreviation and no comma. The month is spelled out in the heading even when the same month would be abbreviated in a works cited entry; the heading uses the full word because it is part of the prose presentation of the paper. For full first-page layout rules, see our cover page for an essay guide.
Date in MLA Works Cited Entries
Dates appear in the works cited entry in the publication-date slot, which is the seventh element in MLA's nine-element entry pattern. The level of detail depends on the source type:
Year only for books, films, and most stand-alone works:
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Knopf, 1987.
Month and year for monthly magazines and journal issues:
Mendez, Carolina. "The Investigation Took Eighteen Months." The Atlantic, June 2023, pp. 44-51.
Day, month, and year for newspapers, daily publications, web sources with a posting date, and weekly magazines:
Roy, Sangita. "Senate Passes Climate Bill on Two-Vote Margin." The Washington Post, 7 Aug. 2022, p. A1.
Date plus access date for web sources where the content may have changed since publication:
Park, Jihoon. "What the New Census Data Misses." FiveThirtyEight, 14 Apr. 2024, fivethirtyeight.com/features/census-misses. Accessed 22 Sept. 2024.
Range of dates for serialized publications or events:
Nguyen, Linh. "Field Notes from the Mekong Delta." Pacific Anthropology, vol. 14, Mar.-May 2022, pp. 88-104.
The works cited format uses the abbreviated month name (Jan., Feb., Mar., Apr., Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., Dec.) for all months longer than four letters; May, June, and July are always spelled out. The abbreviation is followed by a period.
Date in MLA Prose
Dates inside the body of the paper follow the same day-month-year order:
"The Senate passed the bill on 7 August 2022, two days before the recess."
Two prose conventions sit alongside the date format. Centuries are written out and lowercase: "the twentieth century", "the nineteenth century". Decades can use either form: "the 1990s" (no apostrophe) or "the nineties". Date ranges use an en dash with no spaces: "1939-1945", "the 1960s-1970s". The en dash distinguishes a range from a hyphenated compound; word processors usually convert two hyphens to an en dash automatically.
Month Abbreviations in MLA
MLA abbreviates months longer than four letters in works cited entries and leaves shorter months full. The full table:
January: Jan.
February: Feb.
March: Mar.
April: Apr.
May: May (no abbreviation)
June: June (no abbreviation)
July: July (no abbreviation)
August: Aug.
September: Sept.
October: Oct.
November: Nov.
December: Dec.
Note that September abbreviates to Sept. (four letters plus a period), not Sep. as in some British conventions. Each abbreviation is followed by a period; the period is the abbreviation marker and is not optional. The month abbreviation appears only in works cited entries; in the first-page heading and inside the prose, months are spelled out.
Date in MLA In-Text Citations
Most MLA in-text citations contain only the author's last name and the page number, not the date. The publication date appears in the works cited entry, and the in-text citation routes the reader to that entry by author name. There are three exceptions where the date enters the in-text citation:
Two works by the same author. When a paper cites two works by the same author, MLA distinguishes them by a shortened title rather than by date: (Morrison, Beloved 142). MLA does not use the year-first convention APA uses for this purpose.
Date inside the prose for context. When the writer wants to flag the date of a source for argumentative reasons, the date appears in the prose, not in the parenthetical citation: "In her 1987 novel Beloved, Morrison writes..." The date is part of the prose, and the parenthetical citation contains only the page number.
Multiple sources from the same year. No date convention applies; MLA distinguishes by author name or by shortened title rather than by year. For full in-text citation patterns, see our MLA in-text citation example guide.
Common Date Format Mistakes in MLA
Six mistakes recur on graded MLA papers.
Using month-day-year order. Writing "March 12, 2024" instead of "12 March 2024" is the most common date mistake on otherwise clean MLA papers. The month-day-year order is APA's prose convention and Chicago's prose convention; MLA uses day-month-year everywhere.
Adding a comma between elements. "12 March, 2024" is wrong; the day-month-year format uses no commas at all. The same applies in works cited entries: "7 Aug. 2022" not "7 Aug., 2022".
Using ordinal suffixes. "12th March 2024" or "March 12th, 2024" are both wrong in MLA. The day is a cardinal number with no suffix.
Wrong month abbreviation. September is Sept. in MLA, not Sep. May, June, and July are never abbreviated; writing "May 2024" is correct, writing "Ma. 2024" is wrong because four-letter months stay full.
Spelling out months in works cited. Works cited entries use the abbreviated month for months longer than four letters. Spelling out "September 2024" in a works cited entry is a deduction even though the prose convention is to spell out the month.
Missing access date for time-sensitive web sources. Web sources that may have changed since publication require an access date appended to the entry. The access date itself uses the same day-month-year format with abbreviated month.
How the Date Format Connects to the Rest of MLA
The date format is one of the smallest formatting choices in MLA, but it shows up everywhere: heading, works cited entry, prose references, and access dates. Treating it consistently across all four contexts is what separates a clean MLA paper from one that loses marks on layout. The connection to other MLA conventions:
The first-page heading uses the spelled-out month form because it is part of the prose presentation of the paper. The works cited entries use the abbreviated month form because the works cited page is a reference list optimized for fast scanning. The prose date references use the spelled-out month form because they are part of the writer's sentences. One paper, two date layouts, both consistent within their context.
For the broader MLA layout (margins, font, spacing, page numbering), see our mla format guide homework help; for the works cited page itself, see our bibliography example guide; for the in-text citation patterns that routinely appear alongside dates, see our MLA in-text citation example guide.
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