Gibson serial numbers

We cover Gibson serial numbers from 1977–present.

We track 6 serial-number formats across 4 eras for Gibson.

It depends on the era. We document 1 placement for Gibson instruments. See "Where to find the serial number" above for the exact spot for your instrument's era.

Yes. Some Gibson serial numbers can't be dated from the number alone: Gibson six-digit serials from before 1977.

On the standard impressed numbers used since 1977, the year is not at the front. The first digit and the fifth digit are read as a pair and give the last two figures of the year; the three digits between them are the day of that year; the last three are a ranking number for that day's production. Some of these numbers run to nine digits. The extra one is a batch digit that Gibson began inserting in sixth place in July 2005, and it leaves the year exactly where it was.

Three things on the instrument, and none of them is the serial. Look under the digits first: an impressed MADE IN USA puts a six-digit number in the later half of the era, 1970 to 1975, and nothing under them puts it in the years the six-digit shape ran before the stamp, 1963 to 1969; the opening years of the era carry five digits. Then the date codes on the backs of the potentiometers, a six- or seven-digit stamp, which fix the earliest date the instrument can have been finished. Then the headstock and the neck: the logo style, and whether there is a volute, the raised ridge of wood behind the nut that Gibson used from 1970 to 1975. A factory order number stamped inside the body dates earlier Gibsons, but the letter codes for it run out in 1961, so it has nothing to say about a number from this era.

Only as a hint, and only for part of the run. On the 1977 to 1999 numbers the last three digits fall into a low band, 001 to 499, that points at Kalamazoo, Michigan, and a high band, 500 to 999, that points at Nashville, Tennessee. The two bands stopped carrying that meaning at different times: the low band went with the Kalamazoo factory in 1984, while the high band went on naming Nashville until 1989. Electrics come out of Nashville, and the acoustic line has been in Bozeman, Montana since 1989, where the ranking numbers start again from 001 each production day. We mark the plant as probable while the year beside it is definitive, because the ranking number is the only evidence the serial carries for it.

Yes, where the number is eight digits long. That is Gibson's centennial format: 94 for the year, then six digits of production ranking, with no day of the year in it. It was used for that one year only, and Gibson's own wording is that many 1994 instruments carry it rather than all of them, so a 1994 Gibson can equally carry an ordinary day-of-year number instead.

Two kinds of number come back without a year. One is a serial from before 1977, which is where our Gibson coverage starts. The other is a number whose digits fit no shape Gibson has used, which a single transposed digit is enough to cause. The 2014 to mid-2019 run is no longer among them: nine digits with the model year in the first two and a production count behind them, and no day of the year anywhere in it. We read those now, and the answer names a year, marked probable, because a model year opens in the autumn before the year it names. A serial newer than the records we have checked gets its own answer again: it is newer than the chart we carry.