How to format an essay in APA style

APA style is asked for in psychology, education, nursing and most social sciences. This covers the student paper layout from the 7th edition — the one you want unless your tutor says otherwise.

Updated 20 September 2026 · 8 min read

APA style comes from the American Psychological Association, and the current edition is the 7th. It changed a fair amount from the 6th, so if you are following a guide written before 2020 you are probably following the wrong one. The giveaway is the running head: the 6th edition wanted one on a student paper, the 7th does not.

Page setup

These settings apply to the whole document, title page included.

The title page

A student paper has a title page with no running head. Centre everything in the upper half of the page, double spaced, in this order:

1. The title, in bold, positioned three or four lines down from the top margin
2. A blank double-spaced line
3. Your name
4. Your department and university
5. The course number and name
6. Your instructor's name
7. The due date, written out (for example, 20 September 2026)

Headings

APA has five heading levels. Most undergraduate essays need two, occasionally three. Use them in order — you cannot skip from Level 1 to Level 3.

The title of the paper is repeated in bold, centred, at the top of the first page of text. Do not write the word “Introduction” as a heading — the opening section is understood to be the introduction.

In-text citations

APA is an author–date style. Every citation gives a surname and a year, in one of two shapes.

How the authors are listed depends on how many there are:

• One or two authors: name both every time — (Okafor & Lin, 2024). Use & inside brackets and the word “and” in running text.
• Three or more: first author plus et al. from the very first citation — (Okafor et al., 2024). The 6th edition's rule about listing everyone the first time is gone.
• An organisation: spell it out the first time with the abbreviation in square brackets — (World Health Organization [WHO], 2023) — then use(WHO, 2023).
• No date: use n.d. in place of the year.

A direct quotation also needs a page number: (Okafor, 2024, p. 17), orpp. 17–18 across a span. A quotation of 40 words or more is set as a block: no quotation marks, the whole thing indented 0.5 inch, still double spaced, with the full stop before the citation rather than after it.

The reference list

It starts on a new page. The word References is centred and bold at the top. Entries are alphabetical by the first author's surname, double spaced, with a hanging indent — the first line flush left and every line after it indented 0.5 inch.

The basic shape is author, date, title, source:

Points that catch people out:

• Article and book titles are in sentence case — only the first word, the first word after a colon, and proper nouns are capitalised. Journal names keep their title case.
• Italicise the journal name and volume number, but not the issue number or page range.
• A DOI is written as a full https://doi.org/… link. No “Retrieved from” before it.
• A retrieval date is only needed for a page designed to change, such as a live statistics dashboard.
• List up to 20 authors. With 21 or more, give the first 19, then an ellipsis, then the final author.

A checklist before you submit

• Double spacing throughout, reference list included
• Page number top right on every page, starting at the title page
• Title repeated in bold and centred at the top of the first page of text
• Every in-text citation appears in the reference list, and vice versa
• Reference list alphabetical, with a hanging indent
• Titles in sentence case, journal names in title case
• No running head — that was the 6th edition