Heading Elements

Content categories	Flow content, heading content, palpable content.
Permitted content	Phrasing content.
Tag omission	None, both the starting and ending tag are mandatory.
Permitted parents	Any element that accepts flow content; don't use as a child of <hgroup> element, it is now deprecated
Permitted ARIA roles	tab, presentation
DOM interface	HTMLHeadingElement

Attributes

These elements include the global attributes.

The align attribute is obsolete; don't use it.

Usage notes

• Heading information may be used by user agents, for example, to construct a table of contents for a document automatically.
• Do not use lower levels to decrease heading font size: use the CSS font-size property instead.
• Avoid skipping heading levels: always start from <h1>, next use <h2> and so on.
• With the <section> element, you should consider avoiding using <h1> more than once on a page; by convention and for accessibility, it's used for the page's displayed title, with all headings below starting with <h2>. When using sections, you should use one <h1> per section. See "Defining sections" in Using HTML sections and outlines for more information.

Examples

All headings

The following code shows all the heading levels, in use.

<h1>Heading level 1</h1>
<h2>Heading level 2</h2>
<h3>Heading level 3</h3>
<h4>Heading level 4</h4>
<h5>Heading level 5</h5>
<h6>Heading level 6</h6>

Here is the result of this code:

Example page

The following code shows a few headings with some content under them.

<h1>Heading elements</h1>
<h2>Summary</h2>
<p>Some text here...</p>

<h2>Examples</h2>
<h3>Example 1</h3>
<p>Some text here...</p>

<h3>Example 2</h3>
<p>Some text here...</p>

<h2>See also</h2>
<p>Some text here...</p>

Here is the result of this code:

Specifications

Specification	Status	Comment
WHATWG HTML Living Standard The definition of '<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6>' in that specification.	Living Standard
HTML5 The definition of '<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6>' in that specification.	Recommendation
HTML 4.01 Specification The definition of '<h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, and <h6>' in that specification.	Recommendation

Browser compatibility

See also

• <p>
• <div>
• <section>