<tfoot>: The Table Foot element

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 <tfoot> HTML element encapsulates a set of table rows (<tr> elements), indicating that they comprise the foot of a table with information about the table's columns. This is usually a summary of the columns, e.g., a sum of the given numbers in a column.

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Attributes

This element includes the global attributes.

Deprecated attributes

The following attributes are deprecated and should not be used. They are documented below for reference when updating existing code and for historical interest only.

align

Specifies the horizontal alignment of each foot cell. The possible enumerated values are left, center, right, justify, and char. When supported, the char value aligns the textual content on the character defined in the char attribute and on offset defined by the charoff attribute. Use the text-align CSS property instead, as this attribute is deprecated.

bgcolor

Defines the background color of each foot cell. The value is an HTML color; either a 6-digit hexadecimal RGB code, prefixed by a '#', or a color keyword. Other CSS <color> values are not supported. Use the background-color CSS property instead, as this attribute is deprecated.

char

Does nothing. It was originally intended to specify the alignment of the content to a character of each foot cell. Typical values for this include a period (.) when attempting to align numbers or monetary values. If align is not set to char, this attribute is ignored.

charoff

Does nothing. It was originally intended to specify the number of characters to offset the foot cell content from the alignment character specified by the char attribute.

valign

Specifies the vertical alignment of each foot cell. The possible enumerated values are baseline, bottom, middle, and top. Use the vertical-align CSS property instead, as this attribute is deprecated.

Usage notes

  • The <tfoot> is placed after any <caption>, <colgroup>, <thead>, <tbody>, and <tr> elements.
  • Along with its related <thead> and <tbody> elements, the <tfoot> element provides useful semantic information and can be used when rendering for either screen or print. Specifying such table content groups also provides valuable contextual information for assistive technologies, including screen readers and search engines.
  • When printing a document, in the case of a multipage table, the table foot usually specifies information that is output as an intermediate summary on each page.

Example

See <table> for a complete table example introducing common standards and best practices.

This example demonstrates a table divided into a head section with column headers, a body section with the table's main data, and a foot section summarizing data of one column.

HTML

The <thead>, <tbody>, and <tfoot> elements are used to structure a basic table into semantic sections. The <tfoot> element represents the foot section of the table, which contains a row (<tr>) representing the calculated average of the values in the "Credits" column.

To allocate the cells in the foot to the correct columns, the colspan attribute is used on the <th> element to span row header cell across the first three table columns. The single data cell (<td>) in the foot is automatically placed in the correct location, i.e., the fourth column, with the omitted colspan attribute value defaulting to 1. Additionally, the scope attribute is set to row on the header cell (<th>) in the foot to explicitly define that this foot header cell relates to the table cells within the same row, which in our example is the one data cell in the foot row that contains the calculated average.

html
<table>
  <thead>
    <tr>
      <th>Student ID</th>
      <th>Name</th>
      <th>Major</th>
      <th>Credits</th>
    </tr>
  </thead>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <td>3741255</td>
      <td>Jones, Martha</td>
      <td>Computer Science</td>
      <td>240</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>3971244</td>
      <td>Nim, Victor</td>
      <td>Russian Literature</td>
      <td>220</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
      <td>4100332</td>
      <td>Petrov, Alexandra</td>
      <td>Astrophysics</td>
      <td>260</td>
    </tr>
  </tbody>
  <tfoot>
    <tr>
      <th colspan="3" scope="row">Average Credits</th>
      <td>240</td>
    </tr>
  </tfoot>
</table>

CSS

Some basic CSS is used to style and highlight the table foot so that the foot cells stand out from the data in the table body.

css
tfoot {
  border-top: 3px dotted rgb(160 160 160);
  background-color: #2c5e77;
  color: #fff;
}

tfoot th {
  text-align: right;
}

tfoot td {
  font-weight: bold;
}

thead {
  border-bottom: 2px solid rgb(160 160 160);
  background-color: #2c5e77;
  color: #fff;
}

tbody {
  background-color: #e4f0f5;
}

Result

Technical summary

Content categories None.
Permitted content Zero or more <tr> elements.
Tag omission The start tag is mandatory. The end tag may be omitted if there is no more content in the parent <table> element.
Permitted parents A <table> element. The <tfoot> must appear after any <caption>, <colgroup>, <thead>, <tbody>, and <tr> elements. Note that this is the requirement in HTML.
Originally, in HTML4, the opposite was true: the <tfoot> element could not be placed after any <tbody> and <tr> elements.
Implicit ARIA role rowgroup
Permitted ARIA roles Any
DOM interface HTMLTableSectionElement

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard
# the-tfoot-element

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also