GOV.UK footer

The GOV.UK footer provides copyright, licensing and other information about your service.

If you use the page template, you’ll also get the footer without having to add it, as it’s included by default. However, if you want to customise the default footer, read the page template guidance about customising components.

Brand note

Brand refresh of the GOV.UK footer component

From 25 June 2025, the GOV.UK footer component will change to support a wider refresh of the GOV.UK brand.

The updated GOV.UK footer component:

  • uses a light blue as the background colour, instead of grey
  • adds a thick blue top border
  • adds a small crown logo, in addition to the existing coat of arms

To help service teams in government get ready, we’ve released GOV.UK Frontend v5.10.0.

Read the full release notes to see more details and how to update.

When to use this component

Use the footer at the bottom of every page of your service.

How it works

Add a copyright notice to the footer to clarify who owns the copyright. For GOV.UK services, add the coat of arms to keep things consistent with the rest of GOV.UK.

Make it clear whether content is available for re-use - and if it is, under what sort of licence. Use an Open Government Licence unless you have permission from the National Archives to use a different type of licence.

You can add links to:

Use ‘Privacy’, ‘Accessibility’, ‘Cookies’ and ‘Terms and conditions’ for the link text.

If you include links to ‘help’ pages within the GOV.UK footer component, make sure to place those links consistently within the footer content.

Also make sure that ‘help’ links always function in a similar way across each page. This is to comply with WCAG 2.2 success criterion 3.2.6 Consistent help.

Adding secondary navigation

Only add secondary GOV.UK navigation if you’re creating a GOV.UK service, and you want users to be able to navigate away from the service to somewhere else on the GOV.UK website. For example, you probably don’t want to encourage a user to navigate away from a linear, form-type service.

Help improve this component

To help make sure that this page is useful, relevant and up to date, you can:

Need help?

If you’ve got a question about the GOV.UK Design System, contact the team.