Days of the week and months in Dutch

The Dutch days of the week

The Dutch week starts on Monday, and calendars and diaries print it that way, from maandag to zondag. Saturday and Sunday are het weekend; the other five are doordeweekse dagen (weekdays). In timetables and opening hours the days are shortened to two letters, with or without a period: ma or ma.

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The Dutch and the English names come from the same Germanic version of the Roman week (only Saturday kept its Roman god), which is why most of them look alike: zondag and Sunday, maandag and Monday, donderdag and Thursday (Donar and Thor are the same god). Longer short forms such as woe, vrij and zat also exist, but the two-letter set is the one to learn. On a shop door, ma t/m vr means Monday through Friday: t/m is tot en met, up to and including.

No capital letters for days and months

Dutch writes the days of the week, the months and the seasons with a small letter: maandag, januari, de zomer. The official spelling rules of the Taalunie treat them as ordinary words that divide time, not as names. Words built on them stay small too: dinsdagavond, meivakantie, zomertijd.

• Het is maandag. It is Monday. (Een uur te vroeg)
• Mijn verjaardag is in maart. My birthday is in March.
• Ik werk op dinsdag en vrijdag. I work on Tuesdays and Fridays.

A capital comes only where any word gets one: at the start of a sentence (Maandag ga ik naar de markt.). When a sentence starts with ’s, the next word takes the capital: ’s Avonds stuurt Yuki een foto naar haar moeder in Japan. (In the evening Yuki sends a photo to her mother in Japan; from Koningsdag in Amsterdam.)

Holidays work the other way. The names of official holidays take a capital, so Koningsdag, Kerstmis and Pasen, while the informal kerst and words such as eerste kerstdag stay small.

On Monday: op maandag, maandags and ’s maandags

English says on Monday for one Monday and on Mondays for every Monday. Dutch has four forms, and the difference between them is small but real.

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Maandags and ’s maandags are both correct and mean the same. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday are the exception: Dutch almost always writes dinsdags, donderdags and vrijdags, because ’s before a d or a v is hard to say. The ’s is short for des, an old word for "of the", the same ’s as in ’s morgens (in the morning) and ’s avonds (in the evening).

A day and a part of the day make one word, with no capital: maandagochtend (Monday morning), dinsdagmiddag, woensdagavond, zaterdagnacht. Het is dinsdagavond. is the first sentence of the A1 story De grijze bak.

Today, tomorrow and the weekend

These words around the days come up all the time. Week and vandaag are both among the 200 most common Dutch words; the full list, with the days and months among the everyday words, is on the 1,000 most common Dutch words.

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Morgen on its own means tomorrow. The morning is usually de ochtend, but de morgen means morning too, which is where goedemorgen and ’s morgens come from. Het weekend is a het-word: in het weekend (on the weekend), dit weekend, and on a Friday afternoon Fijn weekend. (Have a nice weekend.)

The Dutch months

The twelve Dutch months are close to the English ones, and all twelve take a small letter. The short forms are for tables, calendars and forms; in a sentence, write the month in full.

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The period belongs to the short form, but in lists, tables and diaries it is usually left out: jan, mrt, okt. Mei is never shortened, and juni and juli are often written in full because they are short already. March is the one to remember: mrt., not mar.

Three spellings catch English speakers: januari and februari end in -i, maart has a double a, and oktober has a k. Around a month, Dutch says begin mei (early May), half mei (mid-May) and eind mei (the end of May), with no preposition: Eind mei gaan we op vakantie.

The seasons

Dutch has four seasons and six common words for them, because spring and autumn each have two: de lente or het voorjaar, and de herfst or het najaar. Each pair means the same; voorjaar and najaar are het-words, because jaar is.

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These are the months of the weather service KNMI, which counts every season as three whole months; the astronomical spring starts on 20 March (sometimes on the 19th). With a season Dutch uses in: in de zomer, in het voorjaar. ’s Zomers and ’s winters mean in summer and in winter, every year: ’s Winters is het vroeg donker. The school holidays are named after the seasons and months too: de herfstvakantie, de kerstvakantie, de voorjaarsvakantie, de meivakantie and de zomervakantie.

Dates: how the Dutch write and say them

Dutch puts the day before the month and writes the day as a plain number, with no st, nd or th: 5 mei 2026. With the day of the week in front it is dinsdag 5 mei 2026. In a letter the place comes first, with a comma: Amsterdam, 5 mei 2026.

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In figures the order stays the same: day, month, year, with hyphens or slashes. Forms ask for dd-mm-jjjj (dag, maand, jaar). So 04-05-2026 is 4 May, not April 5: check the order on every ticket and appointment letter. The expiry date on a bank card shows only the month and the year: 09/26 is September 2026.

Say the date with an ordinary number: 5 mei is vijf mei. Years from 2000 start with tweeduizend, and years before 2000 are read in hundreds: 1967 is negentienhonderdzevenenzestig. When the month is clear, people use the ordinal on its own: De hoeveelste is het vandaag? Het is de vijfde. (What is the date today? It is the fifth.) Years, ordinals and the rest of the numbers are on Dutch numbers.

Op 5 mei, in mei

A day or a date takes op; a month, a season or a year takes in.

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Vorig jaar and volgend jaar drop the -e because jaar is a het-word. For a birthday, Dutch uses jarig: Wanneer ben je jarig? (When is your birthday?) Ik ben jarig op 12 maart. (My birthday is on 12 March.)

Week numbers

Dutch diaries and wall calendars print a number next to every week, and work schedules, school plans and delivery dates use it: in week 12, de vakantie is in week 30 en 31, Welke week is het? The count follows the international standard ISO 8601: a week runs from Monday to Sunday, and week 1 is the week with the first Thursday of the year in it (the week of 4 January).

Most years have 52 weeks and some have 53. 2026 is one of them, and the next is 2032. Week 53 runs from Monday 28 December 2026 to Sunday 3 January 2027, so the first days of January can still belong to the old year’s last week. It works the other way too: 29, 30 and 31 December 2025 were already in week 1 of 2026.

Holidays with a fixed date

A few dates come back every year in Dutch life and in the texts on this site. Note the capitals: the names of holidays take one, the days and months do not.

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Easter (Pasen) has no fixed date, and Ascension Day (Hemelvaartsdag) and Pentecost (Pinksteren) move with it. Sint-Maarten and Sinterklaas are celebrations, not days off. Whether an official holiday such as Koningsdag is a day off work depends on the contract or the collective agreement, not on a law.

Typical mistakes

1. A capital letter. Maandag and Januari in the middle of a sentence are wrong: op maandag, in januari.
2. The American order. 04-05-2026 is 4 May. In a Dutch date the day comes first.
3. An ending on the number. English writes May 5th; Dutch writes 5 mei.
4. In with a day. in maandag and in 5 mei are wrong: op maandag, op 5 mei, but in mei.
5. Morgen for morning. Morgen on its own is tomorrow. This morning is vanochtend or vanmorgen; tomorrow morning is morgenochtend.
6. De voorjaar. It is het voorjaar, het najaar and het weekend.
7. Two words. maandag avond is one word: maandagavond.
8. A rare form: ’s dinsdags. Not wrong, but Dutch almost always writes dinsdags, donderdags and vrijdags.

See it in a text

The free texts on this site use the days, months and dates in real sentences. A few of them, word for word:

• Het is dinsdagavond. It is Tuesday evening. Woensdagochtend zet Rahul de grijze bak weer aan de straat. On Wednesday morning Rahul puts the gray bin out on the street again. (De grijze bak, A1)
• Op de deur staat: ‘Zondag geopend van 12.00 tot 18.00 uur.’ The door says: "Open on Sunday from 12.00 to 18.00." (Melk op zondag, A1)
• Zaterdag heeft hij gezegd: ‘Het is koud vandaag. En zondag gaat de klok een uur terug.’ On Saturday he said: "It is cold today. And on Sunday the clock goes back an hour." (Een uur te vroeg, A1)
• Op de kaart staat: ‘Geldig t/m 09/26.’ 09 is september. The card says: "Valid through 09/26." 09 is September. (Kaart geweigerd, A1)
• Is 27 april een zondag? Dan is Koningsdag op zaterdag 26 april. Is 27 April a Sunday? Then King’s Day is on Saturday 26 April. (Koningsdag in Amsterdam, A2)
• Het is woensdag 11 november, zes uur ’s avonds. It is Wednesday 11 November, six in the evening. (Sint-Maarten, A2)

Read next

For a first story built on the days of the week, read De grijze bak, a free A1 text with audio: Rahul has lived in Alkmaar for a month, and on Tuesday evening his gray bin is the only full one in the street. The other free A1 texts are on Dutch reading practice A1.

The A1 book is Fairy Tales: eight fairy tales everyone knows, from Little Red Riding Hood to The Little Mermaid, retold in easy A1 Dutch, with an English glossary, questions and audio. It is out as a paperback on Amazon.