Want to know how to date your Fender guitar by serial number? Then you’re in the right place.

Just enter the number below, hit the ‘Decode’ button and our lookup tool will tell you the year your guitar is from, which country it was manufactured in, and even the plant it came from.

There are a number of possible locations for the serial number on a Fender guitar. These include the top of the neck plate, somewhere on the headstock, on the bridge plate or the back of the neck near the body. Enter the Fender's serial number and select if your guitar was made in USA, Japan, Mexico, Korea, Indonesia or China.

You can use this Fender serial number decoder to date a Fender guitar. The tool works for most Fender electric guitars including the Fender Stratocaster, Fender Telecaster, Fender bass guitars, Fender Squier models and many custom shop and reissue models (although some cannot be dated by serial number). Register your Fender product today. Register your Fender product today. 1-844-202-0924 Why register? Create your Fender profile to get started. Enter serial number or add your product manually. Access your orders, gear, product info and offers. Newsletter sign up company. Customer service.

You can add any model of Fender guitar: Stratocaster, Telecaster, Jaguar, Mustang, Jazzmaster, you name it! (scroll down below if you need help finding the serial number).

Where to Find the Serial Number on Your Fender Guitar?

The location of the serial number has annoyingly changed from model to model over the years. So where do you find it?

Locations include:

At the top of the neck plate
On the front or at the back of the headstock
On the cover plate of the vibrato (on Stratocasters)
On the back of the vibrato cover plate (on early ’50s Stratocasters)
At the end of the heel of the neck
Between the pick-up and the saddles (some Telecasters)

Some General Rules

The naming convention is a bit haphazard (it’s no different with Gibson serial numbers), but here are some general rules that should ring true 99% of the time – but beware, there are plenty of exceptions:

The prefix ‘L’ at the beginning of a serial number indicates a guitar from the early ’60s
The prefix ‘S’ at the beginning of a serial number stands for the decade of the seventies
The prefix ‘E’ stands for the decade of the eighties
The U.S. Vintage Series (launched in 1982) uses ‘V’ as a prefix for the serial number
The prefix ‘N’ at the beginning of a serial number stands for the nineties
The prefix ‘Z’ stands for guitars made in the noughties (2000 – 2010)

Note that made in Mexico Fender guitars (MIM) and made in Japan guitars (MIJ) have their own unique serial number system.

Pre-1976 Model? Check the Heel Too

Before 1976, frustratingly they often randomly assigned serial numbers. If you want to double-check the year of production year, it’s often a good idea to look at the heel of the neck (which entails removing the neck). Sometimes the potentiometers are worth checking too.

That’s all for now. We’ll keep adding more info as and when we find it.

Good luck!

So you need to figure out the year of production for your Fender guitar or bass. You're not alone. Fenders rank as the most frequently bought and sold instruments on Reverb, and finding a precise date of manufacture can be key to determining the value and specifics of an instrument.

The most important thing to keep in mind when dating a Fender is the highly modular nature of the designs. Like Henry Ford, part of Leo Fender's genius was in optimizing the company's production efficiency. His guitars were built en masse by an entire factory, not a single luthier toiling over one instrument at a time. Features like bolt-on necks and pickups wired into the pickguard all helped the Fender factory churn out guitar after guitar, day after day. This also means that various parts used on a particular guitar may have come from different points in time, so no single number can absolutely define when the instrument was built.

Instead, the best approach to dating a Fender is to combine indicators from the design of the instrument, the dates found on the neck and body, along with the serial number. Once you have the information you need, if you're interested in selling your Fender, you can use Reverb to get it in front of the largest audience of musicians in the world by clicking on this link.

Design Changes and Features

Perhaps the best place to start when dating your Fender is to get an approximate idea of the era based on the instrument's design and components. This can be a tall order for someone less versed in guitar history, but we do have some resources here on Reverb to help you out.

For starters, there's the

We also have some other blog posts related to Fender that can hopefully be of some help. There's A Brief History of the Stratocaster Part I and Part II that follows the evolution of the most popular Fender guitar of all. Similarly, take a look at Behold the Jazzmaster for general timeline of the history of everyone's favorite offset guitar. For Fender during the turning point era of the mid-'60s, check out Fender and the CBS Takeover.

Learn everything you need to know to choose the right Stratocaster for you.

Body and Neck Dates

Through much of Fender's production history, Fender workers would print or write a production date on both bodies and necks where the two pieces meet. These dates will tell when the original part was manufactured, but are not exact indicators of when the guitar was actually put together and finished. Office for mac 2013 torrent.

Here is what the neck date and body date look like from a 1952 Telecaster:

If you're not comfortable removing the neck of a guitar to peek at the date marker, I encourage you to take it to a local tech or luthier.

I will also mention briefly pot-codes as a resource (numbers on the internal potentiometers of the guitar). These can definitely be useful in cases where no other numbers exist, but just tell when the pot itself was made. Who knows how long it was waiting in the Fender factory before finding its way into a Tele?

Serial Numbers

Like the body and neck dates, using serial numbers to date a Fender is not a sure bet. At many points in Fender's history, serial number usage overlapped again owing to the modular manner of production. Below we'll go into detail about the various serial number schemes employed by Fender as far back as 1950. There are certainly plenty of exceptions, so again, using serial numbers in conjunction with other dating methods is always the best bet.

Click on the links here to jump directly to the serial number style that matches your instrument:

The Early Years: 1950 - 1954

In the early years, Fender serial numbers schemes were specific to the model. Esquires, Broadcasters and Telecasters shared a serial number sequence, while the landmark Precision Bass had its own system. In this early period, the serial number can be found on the bridge of the instrument (see image).

Here are the rough serial number ranges for the early Esquires and Telecasters:

0001 to 0999	1950 - 1952
000 to 5300	1952 - 1954

And here are the ranges for the original Precision Basses:

161 to 357	1951
299 to 619	1952
0001 to 0160	1952
0161 to 0470	1951 - 1952
0475 to 0840	1952 - 1953
0848 to 1897	1953 - 1954

Also, for the first half or so of 1954, the inaugural run of Stratocasters had a distinct number sequence all under number 6000.

Classic Serial Numbers - 1954 - 1963

By mid-1954, Fender began using a universal serial number sequence for all its instruments. At this time, the location of the serial number also shifted from the bridge to the neckplate (the metal plate located on back of where the neck meets the body).

Here's how the serial numbers break down from 1954 to the beginning of 1963, though there are some areas of inconsistency in this era:

0001 to 7000	1954
7000 to 9000	1955
9000 to 17000	1

Fender Serial Number China