Element: blur event

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 blur event fires when an element has lost focus. The event does not bubble, but the related focusout event that follows does bubble.

An element will lose focus if another element is selected. An element will also lose focus if a style that does not allow focus is applied, such as hidden, or if the element is removed from the document — in both of these cases focus moves to the body element (viewport). Note however that blur is not fired when a focused element is removed from the document.

The opposite of blur is the focus event, which fires when the element has received focus.

The blur event is not cancelable.

Syntax

Use the event name in methods like addEventListener(), or set an event handler property.

addEventListener("blur", (event) => { })

onblur = (event) => { }

Event type

A FocusEvent. Inherits from UIEvent and Event.

Event properties

This interface also inherits properties from its parent UIEvent, and indirectly from Event.

FocusEvent.relatedTarget: The element receiving focus, if any.

Examples

Simple example

HTML

html

<form id="form">
  <label>
    Some text:
    <input type="text" placeholder="text input" />
  </label>
  <label>
    Password:
    <input type="password" placeholder="password" />
  </label>
</form>

JavaScript

const password = document.querySelector('input[type="password"]');

password.addEventListener("focus", (event) => {
  event.target.style.background = "pink";
});

password.addEventListener("blur", (event) => {
  event.target.style.background = "";
});

Result

Event delegation

There are two ways of implementing event delegation for this event: by using the focusout event, or by setting the useCapture parameter of addEventListener() to true.

HTML

html

<form id="form">
  <label>
    Some text:
    <input type="text" placeholder="text input" />
  </label>
  <label>
    Password:
    <input type="password" placeholder="password" />
  </label>
</form>

JavaScript

const form = document.getElementById("form");

form.addEventListener(
  "focus",
  (event) => {
    event.target.style.background = "pink";
  },
  true,
);

form.addEventListener(
  "blur",
  (event) => {
    event.target.style.background = "";
  },
  true,
);

Result

Specifications

Specification
UI Events # event-type-blur
HTML # handler-onblur

Browser compatibility

The value of Document.activeElement varies across browsers while this event is being handled (Firefox bug 452307): IE10 sets it to the element that the focus will move to, while Firefox and Chrome often set it to the body of the document.