How to vertically align text in input type="text"?

An alternative is to use line-height: http://jsfiddle.net/DjT37/

.bigbox{
    height:40px;
    line-height:40px;
    padding:0 5px;
}

This tends to be more consistent when you want a specific height as you don't need to calculate padding based on font-size and desired height, etc.

Use padding to fake it since vertical-align doesn't work on text inputs.

jsFiddle example

CSS

.date-input {     
    width: 145px;
    padding-top: 80px;
}​