inherit

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The inherit CSS keyword causes the element to take the computed value of the property from its parent element. It can be applied to any CSS property, including the CSS shorthand property all.

For inherited properties, this reinforces the default behavior, and is only needed to override another rule.

Note: Inheritance is always from the parent element in the document tree, even when the parent element is not the containing block.

Examples

Exclude selected elements from a rule

css
/* Make second-level headers green */
h2 {
  color: green;
}

/* Leave those in the sidebar alone so they use their parent's color */
#sidebar h2 {
  color: inherit;
}

In this example, the h2 elements inside the sidebar might be different colors. For example, consider one of them that would by the child of a div matched by the rule:

css
div#current {
  color: blue;
}

Then, it would be blue.

Specifications

Specification
CSS Cascading and Inheritance Level 4
# inherit

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also

  • Inheritance
  • Use the initial keyword to set a property to its initial value.
  • Use the revert keyword to reset a property to the value established by the user-agent stylesheet (or by user styles, if any exist).
  • Use the revert-layer keyword to reset a property to the value established in a previous cascade layer.
  • Use the unset keyword to set a property to its inherited value if it inherits or to its initial value if not.
  • The all property lets you reset all properties to their initial, inherited, reverted, or unset state at once.