APA Title Page Format: What Goes Where and Why It Matters

What the APA Title Page Requires

An APA 7th edition student title page has six elements arranged in a specific order, all centered, in the upper half of the page. The page number 1 sits alone in the top-right header. That is the whole structure.

Here are those elements in the order they appear, top to bottom:

• Paper title (bold, title case, three or four lines from the top of the page)
• Your full name (not bold, the line directly below the title)
• Institutional affiliation (the name of your college or university)
• Course number and course name, written together on one line
• Instructor’s name (as they list it on the syllabus, including any title they prefer)
• Due date (written out: October 15, 2025)

Margins are 1 inch on all four sides. Line spacing is double throughout, including between each of those elements. There is no extra space added between any of them by pressing Enter twice. Double spacing handles it.

If your title runs longer than one line, it breaks naturally at the margin and continues on the next line, still centered. A title should not exceed 12 words as a general rule, though APA sets no hard character limit.

A Worked Example You Can Copy Directly

Suppose you are submitting a psychology paper. Your finished title page would read exactly like this when you look at the page.

(Header, flush right: 1)

(Approximately 3-4 blank double-spaced lines from the top)

The Relationship Between Sleep Deprivation and Academic Performance in Undergraduates

Jordan M. Reyes

Westbrook State University

PSY 220 Research Methods in Psychology

Professor Alicia Tran

October 15, 2025

A first attempt usually looks something like this instead.

(No page number in the header)

SLEEP DEPRIVATION AND ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

By Jordan Reyes

Psychology

Prof. Tran

10/15/25

The trouble is that version fails on almost every line. The title is in all caps rather than bold title case. “By” before a name is not part of the APA format. “Psychology” is a subject, not an institutional affiliation. “Prof. Tran” drops the first name that professors often expect. The date uses numerals in a format APA does not specify and most instructors prefer written out. And the page number is missing from the header entirely, which means every page in the paper is numbered wrong, not just this one.

None of those errors is hard to fix once you know what you are looking for.

When the Standard Format Changes

The example above follows the student paper guidelines in APA 7th edition, which is what almost every undergraduate course requires. A few situations shift the rules.

Professional manuscripts submitted for journal publication replace the course details with an author note and require a running head in the header. If you are writing for a class, not a journal, ignore the professional format entirely.

Some departments add requirements on top of APA. A nursing program might ask for your clinical site. An education department might want your student ID number. An honors thesis might require the committee chair’s name in addition to the course instructor. Your syllabus or the assignment sheet is the authority here, not the APA manual alone. When those two conflict, your professor’s instructions win, and you can note in a header comment that you followed the syllabus rather than default APA if it makes you feel better.

APA 6th edition is still in circulation on some campuses. The main title-page difference is that 6th edition required a running head on student papers. If you are unsure which edition your course uses, look at the syllabus date or ask. Most courses switched to 7th edition after 2020, but some departments are slower to update.

For longer papers, the title page is the starting point of a formatting system that runs through headings, in-text citations, and the reference list. How you handle headings inside the paper is a separate question; the College Paper Heading guide covers that in full.

Mistakes That Show Up Right Away

Professors read title pages in roughly three seconds before flipping to the first page of text. These are the things they notice in that window.

Missing page number. The header is set up once and runs automatically through the document. If you forget to insert it on page one, Word or Google Docs may still start the count at two on the next page, which means every page number in your paper is off by one. Set the header before you write a single word of text.

Bold where it does not belong. Only the title is bold on a student title page. Your name, your institution, the course details, the instructor’s name, and the date are all plain text. A common mistake is bolding your name or the entire block because it looks symmetrical. It does not match the format.

Title case errors. Title case means capitalizing the first word, the last word, and all major words in between. Articles (a, an, the), short prepositions (in, on, at, for, of), and short conjunctions (and, but, or) are lowercase unless they open the title. “The Relationship Between Sleep Deprivation and Academic Performance” is correct. “The Relationship between sleep deprivation and Academic Performance” is not.

Single spacing or adding extra blank lines. The whole page is double-spaced. There are no manually inserted blank lines between elements, and the title is not single-spaced or triple-spaced to make the page look different.

Using a header from a different template. If you started from a template someone emailed you or downloaded from a random site, check that it actually uses APA 7th edition rules. Templates for 6th edition or for professional manuscripts circulate constantly and look nearly identical at a glance.

Institution name versus department name. Your affiliation is the name of your school, not your major or department. “University of Central Florida” is correct. “Department of Psychology, University of Central Florida” is the professional format and is not required for student papers under APA 7.

Font inconsistency is another one that slips through. It is easy to paste text from another document and carry a different font with it without noticing. Before you submit, select all the text on the title page and confirm that the font name and size shown in your toolbar match what your syllabus requires. A title page in Calibri sitting above a body in Times New Roman looks careless even if every other element is perfectly placed.

A misplaced page number location is rarer but worth checking. The number goes in the top-right corner, not the bottom, and not centered. Some older templates and certain word processor defaults put page numbers at the bottom center, which is standard in other formats but wrong for APA.

One more thing catches people off guard. If your word processor is set to add space after paragraphs automatically, that setting will insert a visible gap between each element on the title page even though you have not pressed Enter an extra time. The fix is to select all text on the page, open the paragraph spacing settings, and set space before and space after both to zero. Double spacing on its own then controls the entire page the way APA intends.

What to Do Before You Submit

Read each element on your title page against the worked example above and check that the formatting matches line by line. Then click into your header and confirm the page number is there, set to start at 1, and formatted in the same font and size as the rest of the document.

If the rest of your paper still needs work, the research paper introduction guide and the research paper outline guide pick up where the title page leaves off.

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