• When you define a cast for contract_date as 'date:Y-m-d', Laravel internally uses this format when the model's date attributes are serialized to an array or JSON. This is useful for APIs or when you're passing data directly to JavaScript, for example.

• When you access $job->contract_date in a Blade file, it returns a Carbon object. Carbon objects, when converted to strings, show the full date and time. Therefore, you see the time 00:00:00 appended to your date.

To avoid displaying the time in your Blade views, you have a couple of options:

• Use toDateString() Method, as you mentioned
• Format in Blade: <input value="{{ $job->contract_date->format('Y-m-d') }}">
• Accessor in Model:

class Job extends Model
{
    protected $casts = [
        'contract_date' => 'date:Y-m-d',
    ];

    // Accessor
    public function getFormattedContractDateAttribute()
    {
        return $this->contract_date->format('Y-m-d');
    }
}

Then in Blade, you can use:

<input value="{{ $job->formatted_contract_date }}">