How Fender serial numbers got this complicated

Which scheme produced your number decides what you get back: a year, a span, a choice of two countries, or nothing at all. The schemes below run in the order Fender added them, which is also the order the countries came online.

The number came before the dating

For Fender's first two decades the number lived on hardware: a neck plate, or on the earliest Telecasters and Esquires a bridge plate. Dating came later. Fender's own guidance for those years sends the reader inside the instrument, to markings the outside of it doesn't show.

Our tables follow that lead and put no year on a plate number. Type a bare three-to-six-digit Fender number into the decoder and it names the era, says why the digits can't carry a year, and hands back those checks along with the headstock's own evidence: the logo style, the tuners, the decals.

1976 is where the record starts

The year Fender moved the serial onto the headstock is the year the number began carrying its own date. That first year's numbers open with a bare 76 and five digits; from 1977 the pattern that holds for the next three decades is a letter for the decade with a digit behind it for the year inside. Which letter covers which years, and the two schemes that replaced them after 2009, are charted on the United States era page.

Carrying its own date is not the same as being right about it. Fender's chart runs one decal across several years at a time. E0 appears under 1979, 1980 and 1981, and S9 appears under 1978, 1979, 1980 and 1981, and the document they come from says as much outright: dating by serial number, in Fender's words, is not always precisely definitive. Count the US schemes against that and none of them claims a certain year. Six compute one out of the digits and mark it probable. The S collision below can't compute one at all and hands back a set of years. The V reissues don't reach a year by any route: Fender charts a V serial in every year from 1982 to 2017, lists the same numbering under Custom Shop instruments as well, and says the date lives on the neck heel, so we name the line and point you there.

Then Fender stopped being one factory

The schemes multiply from 1982 on, and each new one runs alongside the ones already going. In order:

• 1982: Fender Japan starts building. JV and SQ come first, then single letters, and from here the words printed beside the serial start carrying part of the date.
• 1990: Mexican production begins at Ensenada. An M leads and the character behind it moved on with each decade, which makes these the easiest of the lot to spot.
• 1993: Fender-branded Korean instruments enter the record behind a CN prefix, the one of Fender's two Korean nineties prefixes our charts read, with the digit after it naming the year. A second prefix takes over in 1997: KC, with two digits for the year behind the letters. Fender's chart names a plant for one of the two, and KC is the Cort factory. A Squier-specialist reference places CN at Cor-Tek, which is Cort under its other name.
• 2008: some Fender-branded production moves from Korea to Indonesia, behind an I and one or two factory letters, with the two digits after them giving the year outright.

Korea needs a paragraph of its own, because both ends of its chart sit where Fender's documentation stops. It reads the year straight out of the digits: one digit behind CN, two behind KC. Neither reads as certain. The same article says the numbers for each year overlap across the turn of the year. Fender's Korean digital records begin in the middle of 1993, and it says the numbers that came before are undocumented, so CN0, CN1 and CN2 are left unread. At the top the KC rows run out after KC12, and our chart runs out with them.

Where two schemes produce the same string

Running several schemes at once has a cost, and it shows up as a letter collision: one string that two schemes could both have produced, with nothing in the digits to choose between them. Take S. With six digits behind it, that string is a US instrument from 1976 to 1981, the digit after the letter naming the year, and it is also a Japanese one, where the same S is only a series marker. The Japanese letters collide among themselves too, because most of them were used both before and after the 1997 decal change: the headstock wording is what separates them.

In each of those cases the decoder returns both readings and asks one question about the headstock. Where the digits can't separate two readings, we don't separate them either.

The chart stops before the present, in two ways

Every chart has an end, and ours ends where our sources were last checked. Two of these schemes are open-ended enough to run past that line, MX in Mexico and the I prefixes in Indonesia, and a serial that does is told so in plain terms, alongside the checks that will date it faster than our next refresh can.

The United States US scheme stops differently, and so does Korea's KC. Fender's published articles document them through US17 and KC12, so that is where those two charts end, and a number beginning US18 or KC13 matches no format we carry at all. Both are misses of two different kinds: one is past the end of what we checked, the other is a shape our tables have never carried.

Two Fender products a serial has never dated

Neither of these ever entered the serial system in the first place. Fender didn't archive its acoustic numbers at all, so an acoustic is placed by what it is made of and by the years its model was catalogued. Amplifiers were dated on a different part entirely: an ink-stamped code on the tube chart inside the cabinet, a letter for the year and a second for the month. In both cases the decoder recognizes the shape of the number and answers with what to read.