Date

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The HTTP Date request and response header contains the date and time at which the message originated.

Header type	Request header, Response header
Forbidden header name	Yes

Syntax

http

Date: <day-name>, <day> <month> <year> <hour>:<minute>:<second> GMT

Directives

<day-name>: One of Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, or Sun (case-sensitive).
<day>: 2 digit day number, e.g., "04" or "23".
<month>: One of Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec (case sensitive).
<year>: 4 digit year number, e.g., "1990" or "2016".
<hour>: 2 digit hour number, e.g., "09" or "23".
<minute>: 2 digit minute number, e.g., "04" or "59".
<second>: 2 digit second number, e.g., "04" or "59".
GMT: Greenwich Mean Time. HTTP dates are always expressed in GMT, never in local time.

Examples

Response with a Date header

The following HTTP message is a successful 200 status, with a Date header showing the time the message originated. Other headers are omitted for brevity:

http

HTTP/1.1 200
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2024 16:56:32 GMT

<html lang="en-US" …

Attempting to set the field value in JavaScript

The Date header is a forbidden header name, so this code cannot set the message Date field:

fetch("https://httpbin.org/get", {
  headers: {
    Date: new Date().toUTCString(),
  },
});

Specifications

Specification
HTTP Semantics # field.date

Browser compatibility

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