How to Cite a Website with No Date in MLA (+ Access Dates)
You have the page open, you have scrolled to the footer, you have checked under the headline and the byline, and there is no publication date anywhere. Now the citation form in your head has an empty slot, and the internet is offering you a fix — “n.d.” — that happens to be wrong for MLA. This guide covers what MLA 9 actually says: what the works-cited entry looks like without a date, when and how to add an access date, and why your in-text citation does not change at all.
The shortest answer: omit the date element and never write “n.d.” — MLA forbids placeholders for unknown information. Instead, add an access date at the end of the entry: Accessed 4 July 2026. Your in-text citation is unaffected, because MLA in-text citations never show a date in the first place.
The works-cited entry with no date
MLA’s rule comes straight from the MLA Style Center: “If the web source you are citing does not list a publication date, omit the ‘Publication date’ element from your entry.” You do not mark the absence, apologize for it, or fill the slot with anything. The entry simply runs from the container and publisher straight to the URL:
“Title of Page.” Website Name, Publisher (if different), URL. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.
The MLA Style Center’s own example of an undated web source, reproduced exactly:
“Orhan Pamuk: Un écrivain turc à succès.” Orhan Pamuk Site, İletişm Publishing, orhanpamuk.net/book.aspx?id=10&lng=eng. Accessed 25 Oct. 2015.
Notice what is not there: no date slot, no “n.d.”, no bracketed guess. The access date at the end does the work of anchoring the citation in time.
On placeholders, MLA is unambiguous. Asked whether entries should include “n.d.” for no date, the Style Center answered: “No. Do not use placeholders for unknown information like n.d. (‘no date’) and n. pag. (‘no pagination’) unless your teacher asks you to do so.” And if your teacher does ask, follow the teacher — the person grading the paper outranks the handbook.
The same omit-it rule applies to print sources. An undated pamphlet or book just skips the date element; you do not add an access date, because access dates are for online works only.
When to include an access date in MLA
MLA Handbook 9 treats the access date as an optional supplemental element (sec. 5.111) — never required, but recommended in specific situations. Per the MLA Style Center, you do not need one for a “reliable, stable source,” but you “may include an access date as an optional element if it will be useful to others,” especially when:
- The work lacks a publication date. This is exactly your situation, which is why nearly every undated web citation should end with one.
- The work may be altered or removed — “more common with informal or self-published works.” A personal blog, a wiki, a company page that gets rewritten.
You can safely skip the access date for a journal article in a library database, anything with a DOI, or an e-book — stable, versioned sources that will read the same next year. That is also why the website citation rules give access dates a bigger role than the book or journal rules do.
The format is strict:
Accessed 4 July 2026.
Four details carry the rule. “Accessed” is capitalized and spelled out. The date runs day-month-year, not month-day-year. Months longer than four letters are abbreviated — Jan., Feb., Mar., Apr., Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., Dec. — while May, June, and July are spelled out. And the whole element sits at the very end of the entry, after the URL, closing with a period. It never goes in the publication-date position before the URL.
MLA in-text citation with no date
Here is the reassuring part: nothing changes. MLA parenthetical citations never contain a date — they are author-page citations, not author-date citations — so a missing publication date has zero effect on your in-text citations. If students hunting for a special “no date in-text format” find one, it is an APA format that has wandered into the wrong search results.
Cite the author’s last name plus the page number if the source has pages: (Alvarez 23). If the source has no author, the title moves into the author slot, shortened to its first noun phrase and formatted the way it is formatted in the works-cited entry. For this entry:
“Timeline: Asia-Canada.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica Canada, thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/timeline/asia-canada. Accessed 30 Aug. 2024.
the in-text citation is:
(“Timeline”)
Quotation marks because the works-cited entry has quotation marks; italics only if the entry begins with an italicized standalone title. The first word of the parenthetical must match the first word of the entry so the reader can find it on the works-cited page.
No author and no date
Undated pages are disproportionately also unauthored pages, so the two problems usually arrive together. Three rules keep the entry honest:
Check whether an organization is the author. Many “no author” pages have a corporate author — a museum, an agency, a nonprofit. If so, list the organization as the author in plain text, not italics or quotation marks. But if the organization is both the author and the publisher, MLA says to skip the author slot entirely and list it once, as publisher — which means the entry starts with the title, exactly like the Timeline example above.
Never invent “Anonymous.” Use Anonymous as an author only when the work is actually signed that way. An unsigned page just starts with its title.
Let the title do the in-text work. With no author and no date, the shortened title is your entire parenthetical: (“Timeline”). The full treatment of unauthored sources — including how to shorten longer titles — is in the MLA citation with no author guide.
When you can find the date somewhere else
MLA gives you a middle path between omitting the date and inventing one. If a reliable external source supplies the date — a Wayback Machine capture showing when the page first appeared, a press release announcing the publication, the site’s own footer — you may add it in square brackets to signal that it did not come from the source itself:
“Title of Page.” Website Name, [2020], URL. Accessed 4 July 2026.
A site-wide footer copyright year is usable in MLA if it plausibly applies to the page you are citing — a small static site whose content dates from its copyright year, say. Be skeptical on large sites where the footer year updates automatically every January while the article underneath is a decade old; a bracketed date you cannot defend is worse than an access date you can. (APA, for contrast, tells writers not to use site-wide copyright dates as webpage publication dates at all.)
MLA vs APA when there is no date
The two styles take opposite positions on almost every part of this problem, which is why so many students carry the wrong rule across. The full comparison lives in MLA vs APA; here is the no-date slice:
| Situation | MLA 9 | APA 7 |
|---|---|---|
| Date slot in the entry | Omit it entirely | Write (n.d.) in the date position |
| In-text citation | Unchanged — (Author 23) or (“Title”) | (Author, n.d.) |
| Access/retrieval date | ”Accessed 4 July 2026.” after the URL; recommended especially when the publication date is missing or the work may be altered or removed | ”Retrieved July 4, 2026, from https://…” before the URL; used only when a work is unarchived and designed to change over time |
| Multiple undated works by one author | Distinguished by title, as always | (n.d.-a), (n.d.-b) |
The retrieval-date logic is the subtlest difference. APA’s trigger is changeability — a dictionary entry, a constantly updated stats page — regardless of whether a publication date exists. MLA’s most distinctive trigger is missing information — MLA also recommends an access date when a work may be altered or removed, but here it steps in because the publication date could not. Same-looking element, different reasons to use it, different format, different position in the entry.
Common mistakes
Writing “n.d.” in an MLA entry. The classic APA habit. MLA explicitly forbids placeholders for unknown information unless your instructor requires them. If a works-cited entry on your draft says n.d., delete it and add an access date instead.
Putting the access date in the publication-date slot. The access date is a trailing optional element. It belongs at the very end of the entry, after the URL — “Accessed 6 July 2023.” — not in the date position before the URL where a publication date would sit.
Adding access dates to print sources. An undated book, pamphlet, or handout just omits the date. Access dates exist because web pages change and disappear; paper does neither.
Adding access dates to stable database or DOI sources. A JSTOR article or anything with a DOI is a stable, versioned source. MLA says access dates are for sources that lack a date or might change — piling them onto every entry adds clutter without adding information.
Hunting for a special no-date in-text format. There is none, because MLA in-text citations never contained a date to begin with. If your parenthetical was going to be (Alvarez 23) with a date, it is (Alvarez 23) without one.
Guessing a date to fill the slot. If the date is not in the source and not findable in a reliable external source, the honest entry has no date. A bracketed [2020] is for dates you can verify, not dates that feel about right.
If you would rather not hand-assemble any of this, the generator on the homepage builds the entry from a pasted URL and formats the access date for you.
The principle underneath all of it: an MLA entry records what the source actually shows, nothing more. When the source shows no date, the entry shows no date — and the access date you add at the end is not a substitute but a fact of its own, the one date you can always vouch for because you were there.