Date and time notation in Nepal

Nepal uses both the DMY and YMD format when writing dates, and uses 12-hour format for time.

Date

YYYY-MM-DD is official date format for the Bikram Sambat calendar used in Nepal. While speaking and writing full BS dates, the mmmm d, yyyy format is often used alongside the yyyy mmmm d format. For instance, the 23rd of Chaitra, 2077 BS can be spoken and written as Chaitra 23, 2077 (चैत २३, २०७७) or 2077 Chaitra 23 (२०७७ चैत २३). An example of Vikram Samvat YYYY-MM-DD usage used is the online news portal Onlinekhabar. When using the Gregorian calendar, both YYYY-MM-DD (2025-05-06) and DD/MM/YYYY (06/05/2025) format can be used. While the DMY format (6 May 2025) is used when writing full Gregorian dates, the MDY format (May 6, 2025) is also acceptable. All government documents need to be filled up in the YYYY-MM-DD format. A week starts on a Sunday (आइतबार) and ends on a Saturday (शनिबार).

Nepali months and days

Months

The names of months in the Vikram Samvat in Nepali with their roughly corresponding Gregorian months are given below.

Days

The names of days in Nepali alongside their corresponding English days are given below:

Time

The 12-hour notation (12:56 am) is widely used in daily life, written communication, and is used in spoken language. The 24-hour notation (00:56) is used only in rare situations where there would be widespread ambiguity. Examples include plane departure and landing timings. A colon is widely used to separate hours, minutes and seconds (e.g., 14:39:16).

References

Uses material from the Wikipedia article Date and time notation in Nepal, released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.