Hermes Date Stamp Chart: Blind Stamp Letters by Year

An Hermès date stamp gives the year, not the authenticity. A letter in a circle means 1971 to 1996, in a square 1997 to 2014, plain letters at both ends.

How Hermès Blind Stamps Encode a Year

An Hermès date stamp is one capital letter pressed into the leather with heat and pressure. No ink, no foil, no printing. That is why authenticators call it a blind stamp. The impression is small, often under three millimetres tall, and it sits where a buyer holding the bag in a shop would never notice it.

The letter is a position in a cycle. The shape around the letter tells you which cycle to count in. Get the shape wrong and the year moves by 26 years, which is the single most common mistake made with these marks.

Hermès has run four cycles since the system began in 1945. The first ran bare letters from A in 1945 to Z in 1970, twenty six years for twenty six letters. The second added a circle and started over, A in 1971 through Z in 1996. The third swapped the circle for a square, A in 1997 through R in 2014. The fourth dropped the shape again in 2015 and, for the first time, dropped the alphabet with it.

That fourth change is what makes recent bags harder to date. From 2015 the letters stop running in order. The recorded sequence is T, X, A, C, D, Y, Z, U, B, W, K, G for 2015 through 2026. No public explanation of that order exists. Hermès has never issued a chart, a lookup page or a customer-facing decoder, and the house says nothing about the stamps in its own literature.

So the modern half of every chart on the internet, including the one on this page, is reverse engineered rather than published. Resale specialists record the letter against bags that arrive with dated receipts, then compare notes. The 1945 to 2014 cycles are settled because the alphabet does the work. The 2015 to 2026 letters rest on stock observation, and the most recent two years rest on the thinnest evidence of all. Read them as strong consensus, not as documentation.

Hermès draws the line clearly in its own authentication FAQ. The only guarantee of authenticity, the house states, is a purchase made on its website, in an Hermès store or through an authorised distributor. It adds that it cannot guarantee or verify the authenticity of an item bought outside an official point of sale. There is no exception for date stamps, and no appeal process for a secondhand buyer.

Date Stamp Format by Era, 1945 to 2026

Read the shape first, then count the letter. The cycle decides everything downstream.

Counting inside the first three cycles takes one step. Find the letter’s place in the alphabet, subtract one, add it to the cycle’s first year. H is the eighth letter, so a square H is 1997 plus seven, which is 2004. A circle S is 1971 plus eighteen, which is 1989.

The fourth cycle cannot be counted. It has to be looked up.

Two boundaries in that chart deserve a caveat rather than a number. The 2014 cutover was not clean: Madison Avenue Couture records bags from the later months of 2014 stamped with a bare R, as though the square had already been retired. A bare R on a bag with 2014 hardware is therefore a transition case, not a red flag. The 2025 and 2026 letters are the newest entries in every published chart and carry the least corroboration. Élégance du Luxe notes that K had not been used since 1955 before it reappeared in 2025.

Where the Blind Stamp Sits on a Birkin, Kelly or Constance

The stamp is hidden by design, and the hiding place moved in 2016. That single change explains most of the listings where a seller insists there is no date stamp at all.

On Birkin and Kelly bags made before about 2016, the mark sits on the underside of the outer strap. That is the leather tongue running down the front of the bag and under the turnlock plate. It faces inward. Nothing has to be unpicked to see it: open the flap, lift the strap and angle the leather toward a light. Rebag describes the same logic across the range, with stamps placed behind plaques or inside pockets so the exterior stays uninterrupted.

From roughly 2016 the stamp moved inside. On current Birkin and Kelly bags it is pressed into the interior side wall, high on the gusset, close to the back of the bag. Madison Avenue Couture places it on the left side of the interior near the back flap. That position is dark, and the leather there is soft, so the impression photographs poorly. A seller who says the bag has no stamp has usually looked at the strap on a bag made after the move.

Other models follow their own rules. Constance bags carry the mark along the top interior edge. Picotin, Lindy and Evelyne bags hold it inside, near a seam or a hardware anchor. Belts carry it on the reverse of the strap, near the tip. Wallets and small leather goods use an interior panel or a pocket wall.

Sources disagree on the fine detail of placement by model and year, and that disagreement is itself useful. Treat every published location as a place to look first rather than as a rule. A stamp found somewhere unexpected on an otherwise correct bag is weak evidence on its own. A stamp that is crisp, even in depth and consistent in letterform matters far more than its exact coordinates.

Light does the work. Hold the leather so a lamp rakes across it at a shallow angle. A genuine blind stamp has clean shoulders and an even floor. A stamp that looks painted on, that has ragged edges, or that sits at a different depth on each character is worth more attention than the letter it spells.

Date Stamp vs Craftsman Stamp vs Maker Mark

Three different marks appear on an Hermès bag and sellers call all three the serial number. Only one of them is the date stamp, and none of them is a serial number in the sense buyers expect.

The craftsman stamp is the one that causes trouble. On pieces from 2015 onward the date letter and the craftsman characters run together into a single string, which Rebag describes as a date letter followed by craftsman marks. A reader who types the whole string into a lookup gets nothing back. A reader who takes only the first character gets the year.

The craftsman block cannot be decoded by a buyer. Hermès holds those records internally and does not publish a key. Any page offering to name the artisan from the symbols has invented the mapping. What the block is good for is consistency: an authenticator compares it against the stitching, the saddle-stitch angle and the workshop conventions of that period.

The maker mark dates nothing. It appears on every year of production and on virtually every convincing counterfeit as well. Its value is in execution rather than content. Letter spacing, the height of the accent on the first E and the depth of the impression all have to be reproduced. Small errors there have ended more sales than any date letter ever has.

Plain Letters That Point to Two Years

A bare letter is ambiguous by construction, because Hermès used bare letters twice. The good news is that only twelve letters have appeared in the modern run so far, which means fourteen of the twenty six resolve to a single year on sight.

Letters that can only be 1945 to 1970: E, F, H, I, J, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S and V. Of those, R carries the 2014 transition caveat set out in the era chart.

Letters that carry two readings: T, X, A, C, D, Y, Z, U, B, W, K and G. A bare A is either 1945 or 2017. A bare W is either 1967 or 2024. Sixty years or more separate the two answers, so nothing about the bag will be ambiguous once you look past the stamp.

Resolving one of those takes four steps, in this order.

1. Check the shape again under raking light. A filled circle reads as no shape. This single error accounts for most misdated bags.
2. Read the hardware. Palladium plating arrived in the 1990s. A bag with palladium fittings cannot be from the first bare-letter cycle.
3. Read the model and the leather. Togo leather dates from 1997. Epsom replaced Courchevel in 2003. A Birkin cannot predate 1984, so a Birkin with a bare letter is a modern bag.
4. Check the stamp position. A mark on the interior gusset points to 2016 or later. A mark on the strap underside points to an older bag, whichever cycle it belongs to.

By the end of those four steps the year is usually fixed within a narrow band. The letter confirms the band rather than setting it.

What This Lookup Cannot Tell You

A correct date stamp does not mean a real bag. This limit applies to every free code checker for every house, and it applies with unusual force here. A counterfeiter needs one genuine letter punch to stamp an entire production run, and the letter that comes off that punch passes a format check because it started out correct. Shape checking catches the careless work: a square holding a letter past R, a circle on a bag whose hardware postdates 1996, a letter that no cycle ever used. It cannot rule a bag in.

This lookup cannot query Hermès. No database exists for buyers to search. Hermès operates no serial registry, no verification portal and no customer authentication service, and its authentication FAQ says so in plain terms. Stores will not authenticate a bag bought elsewhere. Spa and repair services accept work at the house’s discretion and acceptance is not a verdict. Any site offering an official Hermès check is describing something that does not exist.

This lookup cannot date anything made before 1945, because the system did not exist yet. Early pieces are dated by hardware, style and provenance. A vintage bag with no date stamp is not automatically suspect.

This lookup cannot name the craftsman, the atelier or the city. The characters beside the date letter are internal records. No published key turns them into a name, and pages that claim otherwise have made the mapping up.

This lookup cannot see the bag. Saddle stitching, the slant and tension of each stitch, hardware weight, the fit of the turnlock, the smell and grain of the leather and the finish on the edge paint all sit outside what a letter can reach. The scale of the counterfeit trade is the reason that matters. In one seizure at the Los Angeles and Long Beach seaport complex, US Customs and Border Protection took 3,960 counterfeit Hermès belts with a genuine retail value of $3,227,400. Port Director Carlos Martel noted at the time that counterfeits are increasingly of higher quality, which makes buyers easy to deceive. A single stamped letter is not a defence against work at that level.

Nothing typed into the checker on this page leaves your browser. The entry is matched against the patterns described here, and it is neither stored nor sent anywhere.

From a Letter to a Decision

Treat the stamp as the first filter and never the last. The Hermès hub collects every check on this site for the house, and the bags category covers the other makers. For a blind stamp that dates nothing at all, compare the Dooney and Bourke serial number lookup. The tools index lists every code lookup here. Two of them make a useful contrast: the Louis Vuitton date code check covers a code the brand abandoned entirely, and the Coach serial number lookup covers a code that encodes both date and style. Hermès sits between them, encoding a year and nothing else.

For a secondhand purchase above a few thousand dollars, a physical opinion is worth more than every letter chart combined. Consignment houses that trade the brand inspect stitching and hardware in hand. That is the step a lookup exists to postpone, not to replace.