padding-inline

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since September 2021.

The padding-inline CSS shorthand property defines the logical inline start and end padding of an element, which maps to physical padding properties depending on the element's writing mode, directionality, and text orientation.

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Constituent properties

This property is a shorthand for the following CSS properties:

Syntax

css
/* <length> values */
padding-inline: 10px 20px; /* An absolute length */
padding-inline: 1em 2em; /* relative to the text size */
padding-inline: 10px; /* sets both start and end values */

/* <percentage> values */
padding-inline: 5% 2%; /* relative to the nearest block container's width */

/* Global values */
padding-inline: inherit;
padding-inline: initial;
padding-inline: revert;
padding-inline: revert-layer;
padding-inline: unset;

The padding-inline property may be specified with one or two values. If one value is given, it is used as the value for both padding-inline-start and padding-inline-end. If two values are given, the first is used for padding-inline-start and the second for padding-inline-end.

Values

<length>

The size of the padding as a fixed value. Must be nonnegative.

<percentage>

The size of the padding as a percentage, relative to the inline size (width in a horizontal language, defined by writing-mode) of the containing block. Must be nonnegative.

Description

The padding values specified by padding-inline can be equivalent to the padding-top and padding-bottom properties or the padding-right and padding-left properties, depending on the values defined for writing-mode, direction, and text-orientation.

Formal definition

Initial valueas each of the properties of the shorthand:
Applies toall elements, except table-row-group, table-header-group, table-footer-group, table-row, table-column-group and table-column
Inheritedno
Percentageslogical-width of containing block
Computed valueas each of the properties of the shorthand:
Animation typea length

Formal syntax

padding-inline = 
  <'padding-top'>{1,2}  

<padding-top> = 
  <length-percentage [0,∞]>  

<length-percentage> = 
  <length>      |
  <percentage>

Examples

Setting inline padding for vertical text

HTML

html
<div>
  <p class="exampleText">Example text</p>
</div>

CSS

css
div {
  background-color: yellow;
  width: 120px;
  height: 120px;
}

.exampleText {
  writing-mode: vertical-rl;
  padding-inline: 20px 40px;
  background-color: #c8c800;
}

Result

Specifications

Specification
CSS Logical Properties and Values Level 1
# propdef-padding-inline

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also