CSS Form Inputs

With CSS, you can style most of the different input types, like text fields, password fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, and file inputs. You can also style input labels and form buttons.

Some commonly used CSS properties for styling input fields, are:

• width
• padding
• margin
• border
• border-radius
• background-color
• color
• font-size

The width property is used to set the width of an input field.

Here we set the width to 100%:

The example above applies to all <input> elements. If you only want to style a specific input type, you can use attribute selectors :

• input[type=text] - will only select text fields
• input[type=password] - will only select password fields
• input[type=number] - will only select number fields
• etc..

The padding property is used to add some space inside the text field.

Note that we have set the box-sizing property to border-box . This makes sure that the padding and eventually borders are included in the total width and height of the elements. Read more about the box-sizing property in our CSS Box Sizing chapter.

The border property is used to change the border size and color, and the border-radius property can be used to add rounded corners:

If you only want a bottom border, use the border-bottom property:

The background-color property is used to add a background color to the input, and the color property is used to change the text color: