APA 7 Headings: The Five Levels, With Examples

The five levels at a glance

Headings are the labels inside the body of your paper that tell a reader what each section is about. They are not the header at the top of the page, which in a student paper holds only the page number. Here is how each of the five levels is formatted, and an example of each from a Bigfoot paper.

Title Case means you capitalize the first word, every major word, and any word of four letters or more. Short words like and, of, the, and in stay lowercase unless they begin the heading.

What the levels look like on a page

Rules in a table are one thing. Here are Levels 1, 2, and 3 doing their job on the second page of a student paper. Notice the title at the top: it is centered and bold like a Level 1 heading, but it is the title, and the introduction under it has no heading at all.

1. The title (it is not a heading)Repeated from the title page, centered and bold. The paragraphs under it are your introduction, and they get no heading.
2. Level 1Your main sections. Centered, bold, Title Case, on a line of its own.
3. Level 2A part of a Level 1 section. Flush left, bold, on its own line.
4. Level 3A part of a Level 2 section. Flush left, bold and italic, on its own line.

The page is set in 12-point Times New Roman, one of the fonts APA 7 accepts, with one-inch margins and double spacing. There is no extra space above or below a heading; the double spacing is the spacing.

Each level, one at a time

Level 1

Level 1 marks your main sections: Background, Method, Results, Discussion, or whatever your paper is built from. Centered, bold, Title Case, on its own line. Every paper that uses headings at all uses Level 1, and a short paper may use nothing else.

Level 2

Level 2 divides a Level 1 section into parts. Flush left, bold, Title Case, on its own line. Use it only when a section genuinely has two or more parts worth naming. This is as deep as most undergraduate and graduate course papers go.

Level 3

Level 3 divides a Level 2 section. Flush left, bold and italic, Title Case, on its own line. You will meet it in theses, dissertations, and long literature reviews, and almost nowhere else.

Level 4

Level 4 is the first of the two run-in headings. It is indented half an inch like a paragraph, bold, Title Case, and ends with a period, and the paragraph text starts right after the period on the same line. If you've typed a Level 4 heading and pressed Enter, delete that line break and keep typing on the same line.

Level 5

Level 5 is identical to Level 4 except that it is bold and italic. Same indent, same period, same text running on after it. If you find yourself at Level 5, you are writing something long, and it is worth checking whether the structure above it is as flat as it could be.

How to use headings so the structure holds

Knowing how each level looks is half the job. The other half is putting them in the right places, and that is where points go missing. Five rules cover it.

1. Main sections are always Level 1. You do not start a section at Level 2 because it feels less important. The level comes from the structure. How much the section matters has nothing to do with it.
2. Go one level deeper only when you are dividing a section. Level 2 lives inside a Level 1 section, Level 3 inside a Level 2. You cannot jump from Level 1 to Level 3.
3. Never use a single heading at any level. If a Level 1 section has only one part, it does not need a Level 2 heading; fold that content into the section. Two or none.
4. Keep headings at the same level phrased alike. If one Level 2 reads Types of Physical Evidence, its siblings should read Evidence From Hair Samples and Evidence From Footprints.
5. The introduction gets no heading. APA assumes the opening paragraphs introduce the paper. Your first heading is the first section after them.

Common mistakes, and the fix for each

• An "Introduction" heading. Delete it. Start writing under the title.
• Sentence case in a heading (Why the hair samples matter). Headings use Title Case: Why the Hair Samples Matter.
• A lonely subheading. One Level 2 under a Level 1 means the section was not really divided. Add a second or remove the first.
• A blank line above or below a heading. Double spacing is the only spacing. Remove the extra paragraph break.
• Level 4 or 5 on its own line. These are run-in headings. The period goes at the end of the heading and the sentence continues right after it.
• Mixing up the header and the headings. The header is the page number at the top right. Headings live in the body.
• A heading at the bottom of a page. If a heading lands as the last line on a page, move it to the top of the next one so it stays with its text.

How PERRLA handles headings

If you write in PERRLA, you choose the level and PERRLA does the rest: the alignment, the bold and italic, the half-inch indent and period on Levels 4 and 5, and the capitalization check. Here is what that looks like.

You pick the level, 1 through 5. Each one comes with a one-line reminder of when to use it, so you are never guessing whether a section is a Level 2 or a Level 3. PERRLA sets centered or flush left, bold or bold italic, the indent and the period on Levels 4 and 5, and the spacing around it. Nothing to format by hand. PERRLA checks Title Case on every heading.

If you change your mind, move a heading from Level 2 to Level 1 and the style follows. It is the same panel everywhere: Text & Heading Style on the ribbon in PERRLA Online and on the PERRLA tab in Word, and Text & Headings in the PERRLA sidebar in Google Docs.

Related APA 101 lessons

• The APA 7 student title page: the six lines, in order, and what goes where.
• In-text citations in APA 7: author, year, and page, and when "et al." applies.
• The APA 7 references page: alphabetical order, hanging indents, and sentence-case titles.
• Block quotes in APA 7: the 40-word line and where the citation goes.
• All 18 lessons in APA 101

Questions students ask about APA headings