Fechas: 'el 15 de mayo de 2024'

A Spanish date looks like el 15 de mayo de 2024 — "the 15 of May of 2024." Once you know that one template, you can write any date in the language. The traps are subtle: the article el is obligatory, the month name is lowercase, the year is read as a single four-digit number, and the preposition before a date is el, not en. We will cover all of these.

The basic template

The default written form is:

el + [day in cardinal numbers] + de + [month in lowercase] + de + [four-digit year]

When the year is obvious from context, you can drop it: el 4 de enero. When the year is the only thing that matters, you can drop the day and month: en 2024. But the structure of a full date never changes order — day first, then month, then year, each separated by de.

Months are lowercase

Unlike English, Spanish does not capitalise the names of months or days of the week unless they begin a sentence or appear in a title.

Day of the week with the date

If you include the day of the week, it goes before the date, also lowercase, and the article el still appears:

You may also omit the article in headers or formal listings (Lunes, 15 de mayo de 2024), where the comma replaces the function of el. This is the format you'll see at the top of letters, official documents, and newspaper datelines.

"The first of the month"

For day 1, two forms compete in peninsular Spanish:

• el uno de — the everyday default, used by the vast majority of speakers in Spain.
• el primero de — historically more formal, still common in Latin America, in legal contexts, and at the start of the year (el primero de enero for New Year's Day).

Both are correct; el primero is never wrong, but in a casual conversation about birthdays in Madrid, you will hear el uno. From day 2 onward, only cardinals are used: el dos de mayo, el tres de mayo, never el segundo de mayo.

Reading years aloud

This is where many English speakers stumble. In English, 1989 is read as "nineteen eighty-nine" — two pairs. In Spanish, years are read as a single four-digit number:

Decades and centuries

Decades follow the los años + tens pattern. The shortcut los [tens] alone is extremely common in speech.

Centuries use Roman numerals and are read as cardinals 1–10 or ordinals up to décimo, with cardinals from eleven onward:

For more on when to use ordinals vs cardinals, see Ordinal Numbers.

Numeric and abbreviated formats

Spain uses day/month/year order — the opposite of the American month/day/year, and matching the rest of Europe.

The Roman-numeral month (15-V-2024) is the marker of a formal letter, a thesis cover page, or a notarised document. Outside those settings it looks affected.

Common mistakes

How Spanish dates differ from English

Three differences cause almost all the trouble for English speakers. First, the preposition: English uses on for a date, in for a month or year. Spanish does the same in spirit, but the article el replaces on — you write el 15 de mayo, not en it. Second, capitalisation: English capitalises May and Monday always; Spanish keeps both lowercase unless they start a sentence. Third, reading years: English chunks 1989 into two pairs, but Spanish reads the full number, which means the year 1492 is six syllables in English ("fourteen ninety-two") and a substantial eight in Spanish (mil cuatrocientos noventa y dos). Expect this to slow you down at first — it slows down native speakers reading aloud, too.