Lucene stores its field data as text, as its purpose is as a full-text search. In other words, there aren't any data types. However, you may get some mileage out of using the string representation of the date (e.g. 2008-02-28), and then can filter your results of a Lucene search by matching the date strings up. If you need something more powerful (such as being able to determine if a date is within a range) then Lucene may not be the best solution for your app... perhaps there is a hybrid approach you can use... using Lucene to do your full-text, and get the db IDs you need to then pull the dates back from there and further filter and then display your results.