:last-of-type

Avatar of Sara Cope
Sara Cope on (Updated on )

DigitalOcean provides cloud products for every stage of your journey. Get started with $200 in free credit!

The :last-of-type selector allows you to target the last occurence of an element within its container. It is defined in the CSS Selectors Level 3 spec as a “structural pseudo-class”, meaning it is used to style content based on its relationship with parent and sibling content.

Suppose we have an article with a title, several paragraphs and an image:

<article>

<h1>A Title</h1>

  
Paragraph 1.
  
Paragraph 2.
  
Paragraph 3.
  <img src="...">
</article>

We want to make the last paragraph smaller, to act as a conclusion to the content (like an editor’s note). Instead of giving it a class, we can use :last-of-type to select it:

p:last-of-type {
  font-size: 0.75em;
}

Using :last-of-type is very similar to :nth-child but with one critical difference: it is less specific. In the example above, if we had used p:nth-last-child(1), nothing would happen because the paragraph is not the last child of its parent (the

). This reveals the power of :last-of-type: it targets a particular type of element in a particular arrangement with relation to similar siblings, not all siblings.

The more complete example below demonstrates the use of :last-of-type and a related pseudo-class selector, :first-of-type.

Check out this Pen!

Other Resources

Browser Support

Chrome Safari Firefox Opera IE Android iOS
Works 3.2+ Works 9.5+ 9+ Works Works

:last-of-type was introduced in CSS Selectors Module 3, which means old versions of browsers do not support it. However, modern browser support is impeccable, and the new pseudo-selectors are widely used in production environments. If you require older browser support, either polyfill for IE, or use these selectors in non-critical ways á la progressive enhancement, which is recommended.