How to align checkboxes and their labels consistently cross-browsers?

Question

This is one of the minor CSS problems that plagues me constantly. How do folks around Stack Overflow vertically align checkboxes and their labels consistently cross-browser? Whenever I align them correctly in Safari (usually using vertical-align: baseline on the input), they're completely off in Firefox and IE. Fix it in Firefox, and Safari and IE are inevitably messed up. I waste time on this every time I code a form.

Here's the standard code that I work with:

<form>
    <div>
        <label><input type="checkbox" /> Label text</label>
    </div>
</form>

Answer 1

Warning! This answer is too old and doesn't work on modern browsers.

_{I'm not the poster of this answer, but at the time of writing this, this is the most voted answer by far in both positive and negative votes (+1035 -17), and it's still marked as accepted answer (probably because the original poster of the question is the one who wrote this answer).}

As already noted many times in the comments, this answer does not work on most browsers anymore (and seems to be failing to do that since 2013).

---

After over an hour of tweaking, testing, and trying different styles of markup, I think I may have a decent solution. The requirements for this particular project were:

1. Inputs must be on their own line.
2. Checkbox inputs need to align vertically with the label text similarly (if not identically) across all browsers.
3. If the label text wraps, it needs to be indented (so no wrapping down underneath the checkbox).

Before I get into any explanation, I'll just give you the code:

label {
  display: block;
  padding-left: 15px;
  text-indent: -15px;
}
input {
  width: 13px;
  height: 13px;
  padding: 0;
  margin:0;
  vertical-align: bottom;
  position: relative;
  top: -1px;
  *overflow: hidden;
}

<form>
  <div>
    <label><input type="checkbox" /> Label text</label>
  </div>
</form>

This code assumes that you're using a reset like Eric Meyer's that doesn't override form input margins and padding (hence putting margin and padding resets in the input CSS). Obviously in a live environment you'll probably be nesting/overriding stuff to support other input elements, but I wanted to keep things simple.

Things to note:

• The *overflow declaration is an inline IE hack (the star-property hack). Both IE 6 and 7 will notice it, but Safari and Firefox will properly ignore it. I think it might be valid CSS, but you're still better off with conditional comments; just used it for simplicity.
• As best I can tell, the only vertical-align statement that was consistent across browsers was vertical-align: bottom. Setting this and then relatively positioning upwards behaved almost identically in Safari, Firefox and IE with only a pixel or two of discrepancy.
• The major problem in working with alignment is that IE sticks a bunch of mysterious space around input elements. It isn't padding or margin, and it's damned persistent. Setting a width and height on the checkbox and then overflow: hidden for some reason cuts off the extra space and allows IE's positioning to act very similarly to Safari and Firefox.
• Depending on your text sizing, you'll no doubt need to adjust the relative positioning, width, height, and so forth to get things looking right.

Hope this helps someone else! I haven't tried this specific technique on any projects other than the one I was working on this morning, so definitely pipe up if you find something that works more consistently.

Answer 2

Sometimes vertical-align needs two inline (span, label, input, etc...) elements next to each other to work properly. The following checkboxes are properly vertically centered in IE, Safari, FF, and Chrome, even if the text size is very small or large.

They all float next to each other on the same line, but the nowrap means that the whole label text always stays next to the checkbox.

The downside is the extra meaningless SPAN tags.

.checkboxes label {
  display: inline-block;
  padding-right: 10px;
  white-space: nowrap;
}
.checkboxes input {
  vertical-align: middle;
}
.checkboxes label span {
  vertical-align: middle;
}

<form>
  <div class="checkboxes">
    <label for="x"><input type="checkbox" id="x" /> <span>Label text x</span></label>
    <label for="y"><input type="checkbox" id="y" /> <span>Label text y</span></label>
    <label for="z"><input type="checkbox" id="z" /> <span>Label text z</span></label>
  </div>
</form>

Now, if you had a very long label text that needed to wrap without wrapping under the checkbox, you'd use padding and negative text indent on the label elements:

.checkboxes label {
  display: block;
  padding-right: 10px;
  padding-left: 22px;
  text-indent: -22px;
}
.checkboxes input {
  vertical-align: middle;
}
.checkboxes label span {
  vertical-align: middle;
}

<form>
  <div class="checkboxes">
    <label for="x"><input type="checkbox" id="x" /> <span>Label text x so long that it will probably wrap so let's see how it goes with the proposed CSS (expected: two lines are aligned nicely)</span></label>
    <label for="y"><input type="checkbox" id="y" /> <span>Label text y</span></label>
    <label for="z"><input type="checkbox" id="z" /> <span>Label text z</span></label>
  </div>
</form>

Answer 3

try vertical-align: middle

also your code seems like it should be:

<form>
    <div>
        <input id="blah" type="checkbox"><label for="blah">Label text</label>
    </div>
</form>