 <p>This is because you are outputting a numeric field. If you look at your HTML you will see that you have something like this:</p> <pre><code>&lt;input type="number" ... /&gt; </code></pre> <p>By defining the type as a numbber, the browser knows what to expect and it will give you a generic message. This is part of Html 5 spec. </p> <p>If you want to override the default behavior you could do this:</p> <pre><code>@Html.TextBoxFor(model =&gt; model.residentialExperience, new { @type = "text" }) </code></pre>