South Africa Date and Number Format

In short South Africa writes dates year, month, day — 23 July 2026 is 2026/07/23 — and numbers as 1 234 567,89. South Africa writes English and formats numbers continentally: a comma for the decimal and a space for thousands, so one point five is 1,5. An English-language document is no guarantee of an English-language number format. Two general points apply to reading anything from here. First, the date order and the number format vary independently: 8 of the 39 locales checked share this date order, and that tells you nothing about how they punctuate numbers. Britain writes dates the European way and numbers the American way; South Africa writes English and formats numbers continentally. Second, the separator characters matter more than they look. Six different characters group thousands across these locales and three of them are invisible or near-invisible, so a figure that pastes into a spreadsheet as text usually has a separator the spreadsheet did not recognise rather than anything wrong with the number. Every value on this page was extracted from Intl rather than transcribed, and the page re-checks the thousands separator against your own browser when it loads — CLDR revisions land in browsers and in Node at different times, so a static table can be right when it is written and out of date by the time it is read.