APA 7th Edition Format: The Complete Student Guide

You can write a genuinely good paper and still get it back bled through with red ink, most of it over margins and headings instead of a single word of your argument. If that has happened to you, you are in good company, and you are not missing something obvious. APA formatting is fussy, most of it is never actually taught, and almost everyone gets pieces of it wrong the first few times.

So we put the whole thing in one place, in the order you actually build a paper. This is the complete student guide to APA 7th edition format: page setup, the title page, headings, in-text citations, and the reference list. APA 7 (the seventh edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, published in 2020) is almost certainly the version your class uses, and it changed enough from the sixth edition that older templates and half-remembered rules will quietly cost you points. Get the setup right once and most of the rest falls into place on its own.

APA 7th edition format starts with the page setup, not the writing

Here is the good news to start with: most formatting errors are really one setup mistake repeating on every page. Fix these four things before you type another word and a whole column of red marks never happens.

• Margins: 1 inch on all four sides (APA 7, Section 2.22). Word defaults to 1 inch now, but older documents and school templates often carry 1.25 inches, so it is worth checking under Layout → Margins → Normal.
• Font: APA 7 no longer forces Times New Roman. It accepts several fonts, including 12-point Times New Roman, 11-point Calibri, 11-point Arial, and 11-point Georgia (Section 2.19). Pick one and use it everywhere, including headings and page numbers.
• Spacing: double-spaced throughout, with no extra space before or after paragraphs. That last part catches almost everyone, because Word quietly adds 8 points after each paragraph by default. Set the spacing before and after to 0.
• Indent: a first-line indent of 0.5 inches on every body paragraph, set through paragraph formatting rather than the Tab key or the space bar.

The indent rule is worth slowing down on, because the Tab key looks identical on screen and gives you away on inspection. Set it once: Home → Paragraph → Special → First line → 0.5". Now every paragraph indents automatically and consistently, and you never touch Tab again.

The title page: use the student version, not the professional one

The mistake: using a professional title page (the one with a running head and an author note) for a class paper.

This one is easy to fall into, because APA 7 created two different title pages and plenty of templates online use the wrong one. The student title page has no running head. It carries the paper title in bold, centered, in the upper half of the page, followed by your name, your department and school, the course number and name, your instructor, and the due date, each on its own line (Section 2.3).

Why it matters: the running head used to be mandatory for everyone, which is why so much old advice still tells you to add one. Under APA 7 it is only required for professional manuscripts headed for publication. A running head on a class paper quietly signals that you are working from outdated instructions, and an attentive instructor picks up on it.

The fix: unless your professor specifically asks for a running head, use the student title page. If you want to see exactly what moved when the manual changed, our walkthrough of the seven APA 7th edition changes that still trip up graduate students covers the title page shift in detail.

Headings that quietly signal your structure

APA 7 has five heading levels, and each has an exact format. Level 1 is centered and bold. Level 2 is flush left and bold. Level 3 is flush left, bold, and italic. Levels 4 and 5 are indented, run into the paragraph, and end with a period (Section 2.27).

Why it matters: headings do real work. They tell the reader, and the grader, how your argument is organized before anyone reads the words. A paper that jumps from a Level 1 heading straight to a Level 3, or bolds a heading that should be plain, reads as disorganized even when the thinking underneath is sharp.

The fix: use only as many levels as your paper actually needs, and never skip one. A short paper often gets by on Level 1 and Level 2 alone. Set each level up as a Word style so it stays consistent, and if your headings look off even though you followed the rules, our breakdown of why headings look wrong when you think you got them right covers the subtler traps.

In-text citations: match every source to the reference list

APA uses the author-date system: the author's last name and the year, either in parentheses at the end of the sentence (Smith, 2020) or worked into the sentence as Smith (2020). For a direct quotation, add the page number: (Smith, 2020, p. 14).

The rule people miss: for a work with three or more authors, use the first author's name followed by "et al." from the very first citation (Section 8.17). APA 6 asked you to list all authors the first time, so this trips up anyone who learned the old way. And every in-text citation needs a matching entry in the reference list, with nothing left over on either side.

The fix: once your draft is done, read the paper one more time looking only at citations, and check each one against the reference list. It sounds tedious, and it takes ten minutes, but a study in the Journal of European Psychology Students found the large majority of reviewed papers carried in-text citation errors, so this single pass catches the mistakes almost everyone makes.

The reference list: where the most points quietly disappear

The reference list gets its own page, titled References in bold and centered, with entries double-spaced and alphabetized by the first author's last name. Every entry uses a hanging indent: the first line sits flush left and every line after it is indented 0.5 inches (Section 2.12).

Why it matters: the same Journal of European Psychology Students review found reference-list errors in the large majority of the papers it looked at, which makes it the single densest place to lose points in the whole document. The reason is simple and a little unfair: one wrong pattern repeats itself across every entry.

The fix: set the hanging indent through paragraph formatting rather than pressing Enter and Tab inside each entry, which falls apart the moment you add a source. The mechanics shift slightly by source type, so keep our guide to the difference between a reference list and a bibliography handy while you build it.

One last pass before you submit

When the writing is finished, give the document a formatting-only read. Confirm the margins and font are consistent, the title page matches the student format, the headings step down in order, every citation has a reference and every reference has a citation, and the reference page uses a hanging indent. These are the items a grader checks first, and they are exactly the ones you stop being able to see after you have read your own paper a dozen times.

Or let us do the tedious part

You can absolutely check all of this by hand, and now you know what to look for. But this is the boring, easy-to-miss layer of the work, so we built StyleMyPaper to handle it for you. Upload your finished draft and it works through the APA 7 layer, from margins and headings to citations and the reference list, then formats the document and tells you what it changed, so nothing happens to your paper that you didn't see. It is the fastest way to catch the marks your professor would have circled. See how the APA formatting tool works, or run your first paper through free.