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<time>

Indicating a date, time, or duration readable by machines

— 1 min read

  • HTML
  • accessibility
  • semantics

<time> — Date and time

The <time> element represents a date, time, or duration. The datetime attribute provides the value in ISO 8601 format, readable by machines.

When to use it

You want to indicate a publication date, an event time, a deadline, or a duration. The visible text can be in natural language; the datetime attribute supplies the machine version.

What you gain

Accessibility: screen readers read the visible text, not the datetime. The benefit is for machines: the datetime removes ambiguity from "04/05/2026" (April or May?) without changing what the user sees.

SEO: Google does not use the datetime attribute of <time>. For rich results, you need Schema.org datePublished and dateModified properties in JSON-LD (Google documentation).

Code example

<p>Published on <time datetime="2026-04-24">April 24, 2026</time>.</p>
 
<p>The meeting starts at <time datetime="14:30">2:30 PM</time>.</p>
 
<p>Cooking time: <time datetime="PT1H30M">1 hour 30 minutes</time>.</p>

Further reading