HTMLFormElement: submit 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.

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The submit event fires when a <form> is submitted.

Syntax

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

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

onsubmit = (event) => { }

The submit event fires on the <form> element itself, and not on any <button> or <input type="submit"> inside it. However, the SubmitEvent which is sent to indicate the form's submit action has been triggered includes a submitter property, which is the button that was invoked to trigger the submit request.

The submit event fires when:

the user clicks a submit button,
the user submits the form implicitly,
a script calls the form.requestSubmit() method

However, the event is not sent to the form when a script calls the form.submit() method directly.

Trying to submit a form that does not pass validation triggers an invalid event. In this case, the validation prevents form submission, and thus there is no submit event.

Implicit submission

The HTML specification does not formally define what user gestures may trigger implicit submission, because it depends on operating system and device conventions. For example, pressing Enter while focusing on a text input is a common gesture. However, the browser's reaction to such a gesture is standardized:

If the form has a non-disabled default submit button, the browser fires a click event at that button. The default button is the first submit button in tree order whose form owner is that form. This then triggers the form submission process (as if the button has been pressed by the user), unless the event is canceled.
If the form has no submit button, it is submitted implicitly only when it has at most one <input> element of type text, search, tel, url, email, password, date, month, week, time, datetime-local, or number. <textarea> and <select> elements do not block implicit submission.
Otherwise, if the form has a disabled default submit button, or no submit button and more than one input blocking implicit submission, the gesture never triggers implicit submission.

Examples

This example uses EventTarget.addEventListener() to listen for form submit, and logs the current Event.timeStamp whenever that occurs, then prevents the default action of submitting the form.

HTML

html

<form id="form">
  <label>Test field: <input type="text" /></label>
  <br /><br />
  <button type="submit">Submit form</button>
</form>
<p id="log"></p>

JavaScript

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

function logSubmit(event) {
  log.textContent = `Form Submitted! Timestamp: ${event.timeStamp}`;
  event.preventDefault();
}

form.addEventListener("submit", logSubmit);