United Kingdom Date and Number Format

In short United Kingdom writes dates day, month, year — 23 July 2026 is 23/07/2026 — and numbers as 1,234,567.89. Britain writes the date day-first and the number American-style, with a full stop for the decimal and a comma for thousands. That split catches people out in both directions: a British spreadsheet reads like an American one and a British date does not. Two general points apply to reading anything from here. First, the date order and the number format vary independently: 30 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.