assignment apa

APA (7th Edition) Referencing Guide

• Information for EndNote Users
• Authors - Numbers, Rules and Formatting
• In-Text Citations
• Reference List
• Books & eBooks
• Book chapters
• Journal Articles
• Conference Papers
• Newspaper Articles
• Web Pages & Documents
• Specialised Health Databases
• Using Visual Works in Assignments & Class Presentations
• Using Visual Works in Theses and Publications
• Using Tables in Assignments & Class Presentations
• Custom Textbooks & Books of Readings
• ABS AND AIHW
• Videos (YouTube), Podcasts & Webinars
• Blog Posts and Social Media
• First Nations Works
• Dictionary and Encyclopedia Entries
• Personal Communication
• Theses and Dissertations
• Film / TV / DVD
• Miscellaneous (Generic Reference)
• AI software

APA 7th examples and templates

Apa formatting tips, thesis formatting, tables and figures, acknowledgements and disclaimers.

• What If...?
• Other Guides
• EscAPA7de - the APA escape room
• One Minute Video Series (APA)

You can view the samples here:

• APA Style Sample Papers From the official APA Style and Grammar Guidelines

Quick formatting notes taken from the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association 7th edition

Use the same font throughout the text of your paper, including the title and any headings. APA lists the following options (p. 44):

• Sans serif fonts such as 11-point Calibri, 11 point-Arial, 10-point Lucida,
• Serif fonts such as 12-point Times new Roman, 11-point Georgia or 10-point Computer Modern.

(A serif font is one that has caps and tails - or "wiggly bits" - on it, like Times New Roman . The font used throughout this guide is a sans serif [without serif] font). You may want to check with your lecturer to see if they have a preference.

In addition APA suggests these fonts for the following circumstances:

• Within figures, use a sans serif font between 8 and 14 points.
• When presenting computer code, use a monospace font such as 10-point Lucida Console or 10-point Courier New.
• Footnotes: a 10-point font with single line spacing.

Line Spacing:

"Double-space the entire paper, including the title page, abstract, text, headings, block quotations, reference list, table and figure notes, and appendices, with the following exceptions:" (p. 45)

• Table and figures: Words within tables and figures may be single-, one-and-a-half- or double-spaced depending on what you decide creates the best presentation.
• Footnotes: Footnotes appearing at the bottom of the page to which they refer may be single-spaced and formatted with the default settings on your word processing program i.e. Word.
• Equations: You may triple- or quadruple-space before and after equations.

"Use 1 in. (2.54 cm) margins on all sides (top, bottom, left, and right) of the page." If your subject outline or lecturer has requested specific margins (for example, 3cm on the left side), use those.

"Align the text to the left and leave the right margin uneven ('ragged'). Do not use full justification, which adjusts the spacing between words to make all lines the same length (flush with the margins).  Do not manually divide words at the end of a line" (p. 45).

Do not break hyphenated words. Do not manually break long DOIs or URLs.

Indentations:

"Indent the first line of every paragraph... for consistency, use the tab key... the default settings in most word-processing programs are acceptable. The remaining lines of the paragraph should be left-aligned." (p. 45)

Exceptions to the paragraph indentation requirements are as follows:

• Title pages to be centred.
• The first line of abstracts are left aligned (not indented).
• Block quotes are indented 1.27 cm (0.5 in). The first paragraph of a block quote is not indented further. Only the first line of the second and subsequent paragraphs (if there are any) are indented a further 1.27 cm (0.5 in). (see What if...Long quote  in this LibGuide)
• Level 1 headings, including appendix titles, are centred. Level 2 and Level 3 headings are left aligned..
• Table and figure captions, notes etc. are flush left.

Page numbers:

Page numbers should be flush right in the header of each page. Use the automatic page numbering function in Word to insert page numbers in the top right-hand corner. The title page is page number 1.

Reference List:

• Start the reference list on a new page after the text but before any appendices.
• Label the reference list References  (bold, centred, capitalised).
• Double-space all references.
• Use a hanging indent on all references (first line is flush left, the second and any subsequent lines are indented 1.27 cm (0.5 in). To apply a hanging indent in Word, highlight all of your references and press Ctrl + T  on a PC, or  Command (⌘) + T  on a Mac.

Level 1 Heading - Centered, Bold, Title Case

Text begins as a new paragraph i.e. first line indented...

Level 2 Heading - Flush Left, Bold, Title Case

Level 3 Heading - Flush Left, Bold, Italic, Title Case

Level 4 Heading Indented, Bold, Title Case Heading, Ending With a Full Stop. Text begins on the same line...

Level 5 Heading, Bold, Italic, Title Case Heading, Ending with a Full Stop.  Text begins on the same line...

Please note : Any formatting requirements specified in the subject outline or any other document or web page supplied to the students by the lecturers should be followed instead of these guidelines.

What is an appendix?

Appendices contain matter that belongs with your paper, rather than in it.

For example, an appendix might contain

• the survey questions or scales you used for your research,
• detailed description of data that was referred to in your paper,
• long lists that are too unweildy to be given in the paper,
• correspondence recieved from the company you are analysing,
• copies of documents being discussed (if required),

You may be asked to include certain details or documents in appendices, or you may chose to use an appendix to illustrate details that would be inappropriate or distracting in the body of your text, but are still worth presenting to the readers of your paper.

Each topic should have its own appendix. For example, if you have a survey that you gave to participants and an assessment tool which was used to analyse the results of that survey, they should be in different appendices. However, if you are including a number of responses to that survey, do not put each response in a separate appendix, but group them together in one appendix as they belong together.

How do you format an appendix?

Appendices go at the very end of your paper , after your reference list. (If you are using footnotes, tables or figures, then the end of your paper will follow this pattern: reference list, footnotes, tables, figures, appendices).

Each appendix starts on a separate page. If you have only one appendix, it is simply labelled "Appendix". If you have more than one, they are given letters: "Appendix A", "Appendix B", "Appendix C", etc.

The label for your appendix (which is just "Appendix" or "Appendix A" - do not put anything else with it), like your refrerence list, is placed at the top of the page, centered and in bold , beginning with a capital letter.

You then give a title for your appendix, centered and in bold , on the next line.

Use title case for the appendix label and title.

The first paragraph of your appendix is not indented (it is flush with the left margin), but all other paragraphs follow the normal pattern of indenting the first line. Use double line spacing, just like you would for the body of your paper.

How do I refer to my appendices in my paper?

In your paper, when you mention information that will be included or expanded upon in your appendices, you refer to the appendix by its label and capitalise the letters that are capitalised in the label:

Questions in the survey were designed to illicit reflective responses (see Appendix A).

As the consent form in Appendix B illustrates...

How do I use references in my appendices?

Appendices are considered to be part of your paper for the purpose of referencing. Any in-text citations used in your appendix should be formatted exactly the same way you would format it in the body of your paper, and the references cited in your appendices will go in your reference list (they do not go in a special section of your reference list, but are treated like normal references).

If you have included reproduced matter in your appendices, treat them like an image or a table that has been copied or adapted. Place the information for the source in the notes under the reproduced matter (a full copyright acknowledgement for theses or works being published, or the shorter version used at JCU for assignments), and put the reference in the reference list.

• Thesis Formatting Guide Our Library Guide offers some advice on formatting a thesis for JCU higher degrees.
• Setting up a table in APA 7th
• Setting up a figure in APA 7th

If you are required to include an acknowledgement or disclaimer (for example, a statement of whether any part of your assignment was generated by AI, or if any part of your assignment was re-used, with permission, from a previous assignment), this should go in an author note .

The author note is placed on the bottom half of the title page, so if you are using an author note, you will need to use a title page. Place the section title Author Note in centre and in bold. Align the paragraph text as per a normal paragraph, beginning with an indent. See the second image on this page for an example of where to place the author note: Title Page Setup .

The APA Publication Manual lists several paragraphs that could be included in an author note, and specifies the order in which they should appear. For a student assignment, you will probably only require a paragraph or sentence on disclosures and acknowledgements.

An example author note for a student paper could be:

Author Note

This paper was prepared using Bing Copilot to assist with research and ChatGPT to assist with formatting the reference list. No generative AI software was used to create any part of the submitted text.

No generative AI software was used to create any part of this assignment.

• If the use of generative AI was permitted for drafting or developing parts of your assignment, you will need to include a description in the methodology section of your paper specifying what software was used, what it was used for and to what extent.
• If your subject outline has a specific disclaimer to use, use that wording in your author's note.
• If the use of generative AI software is permitted, you will still need to review the material produced by the software for suitability and accuracy, as the author of the paper is ultimately responsible for all of the content.
• << Previous: AI software
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• Last Updated: Jun 19, 2024 2:43 PM
• URL: https://libguides.jcu.edu.au/apa

Home / Guides / Citation Guides / APA Format

APA Format for Students & Researchers

In this guide, students and researchers can learn the basics of creating a properly formatted research paper according to APA guidelines.

It includes information on how to conceptualize, outline, and format the basic structure of your paper, as well as practical tips on spelling, abbreviation, punctuation, and more. The guide concludes with a complete sample paper as well as a final checklist that writers can use to prepare their work for submission.

APA Paper Formatting Basics

• All text should be double-spaced
• Use one-inch margins on all sides
• All paragraphs in the body are indented
• Make sure that the title is centered on the page with your name and school/institution underneath
• Use 12-point font throughout
• All pages should be numbered in the upper right hand corner
• The manual recommends using one space after most punctuation marks
• A shortened version of the title (“running head”) should be placed in the upper left hand corner

Table of Contents

Here’s a quick rundown of the contents of this guide on how to do APA format.

Information related to writing and organizing your paper:

• Paper and essay categories

General paper length

• Margin sizes
• Title pages
• Running Heads
• APA Outline
• APA Abstract
• The body of papers
• APA headings and subheadings
• Use of graphics (tables and figures)

Writing style tips:

Proper tone.

• Reducing bias and labels
• Abbreviation do’s and don’ts
• Punctuation
• Number rules

Citing Your Sources:

• Citing Sources
• In-text Citations
• Reference Page

Proofing Your Paper:

• Final checklist
• Submitting your project

APA Information:

• What is APA
• APA 7 Updates

What you won’t find in this guide: This guide provides information related to the formatting of your paper, as in guidelines related to spacing, margins, word choice, etc. While it provides a general overview of APA references, it does not provide instructions for how to cite in APA format.

For step-by-step instructions for citing books, journals, how to cite a website in APA format, information on an APA format bibliography, and more, refer to these other EasyBib guides:

• APA citation (general reference guide)
• APA In-text citation
• APA article citation
• APA book citation
• APA citation website

Or, you can use our automatic generator. Our APA formatter helps to build your references for you. Yep, you read that correctly.

Writing and Organizing Your APA Paper in an Effective Way

This section of our guide focuses on proper paper length, how to format headings, spacing, and more! This information can be found in Chapter 2 of the official manual (American Psychological Association, 2020, pp. 29-67).

Categories of papers

Before getting into the nitty-gritty details related to APA research paper format, first determine the type of paper you’re about to embark on creating:

Empirical studies

Empirical studies take data from observations and experiments to generate research reports. It is different from other types of studies in that it isn’t based on theories or ideas, but on actual data.

Literature reviews

These papers analyze another individual’s work or a group of works. The purpose is to gather information about a current issue or problem and to communicate where we are today. It sheds light on issues and attempts to fill those gaps with suggestions for future research and methods.

Theoretical articles

These papers are somewhat similar to a literature reviews in that the author collects, examines, and shares information about a current issue or problem, by using others’ research. It is different from literature reviews in that it attempts to explain or solve a problem by coming up with a new theory. This theory is justified with valid evidence.

Methodological articles

These articles showcase new advances, or modifications to an existing practice, in a scientific method or procedure. The author has data or documentation to prove that their new method, or improvement to a method, is valid. Plenty of evidence is included in this type of article. In addition, the author explains the current method being used in addition to their own findings, in order to allow the reader to understand and modify their own current practices.

Case studies

Case studies present information related an individual, group, or larger set of individuals. These subjects are analyzed for a specific reason and the author reports on the method and conclusions from their study. The author may also make suggestions for future research, create possible theories, and/or determine a solution to a problem.

Since APA style format is used often in science fields, the belief is “less is more.” Make sure you’re able to get your points across in a clear and brief way. Be direct, clear, and professional. Try not to add fluff and unnecessary details into your paper or writing.  This will keep the paper length shorter and more concise.

Margin sizes in APA Format

When it comes to margins, keep them consistent across the left, right, top, and bottom of the page. All four sides should be the same distance from the edge of the paper. It’s recommended to use at least one-inch margins around each side. It’s acceptable to use larger margins, but the margins should never be smaller than an inch.

Title pages in APA Format

The title page, or APA format cover page, is the first page of a paper or essay. Some teachers and professors do not require a title page, but some do. If you’re not sure if you should include one or not, ask your teacher. Some appreciate the page, which clearly displays the writer’s name and the title of the paper.

The APA format title page for student papers includes six main components:

• the title of the APA format paper
• names of all authors
• institutional affiliation
• course number and title
• instructor’s name

Title pages for professional papers  also require a running head; student papers do not.

Some instructors and professional publications also ask for an author’s note. If you’re required or would like to include an author’s note, place it below the institutional affiliation. Examples of information included in an author’s note include an ORCID iD number, a disclosure, and an acknowledgement.

Here are key guidelines to developing your title page:

• The title of the paper should capture the main idea of the essay, but should not contain abbreviations or words that serve no purpose. For example, instead of using the title “A Look at Amphibians From the Past,” title the paper “Amphibians From the Past.” Delete the unnecessary fluff!
• Center the title on the page and place it about 3-4 lines from the top.
• The title should be bolded, in title case, and the same font size as your other page text. Do not underline or italicize the title. Other text on the page should be plain (not bolded , underlined, or italicized ). 
• All text on the title page should be double-spaced. The APA format examples paper below displays proper spacing, so go take a look!
• Do not include any titles in the author’s name such as Dr. or Ms. In contrast, for your instructor’s name, use the form they prefer (e.g., Sagar Parekh, PhD; Dr. Minako Asato; Professor Nathan Ian Brown; etc.).
• The institutional affiliation is the school the author attends or the location where the author conducted the research.

In a hurry? Try the  EasyBib title page maker to easily create a title page for free.

Sample of an APA format title page for a student paper:

Sample of title page for a professional paper:

Running heads in APA Format

The 7th edition of the American Psychological Association Publication Manual (p. 37) states that running heads are not required for student papers unless requested by the instructor. Student papers still need a page number included in the upper right-hand corner of every page. The 6th edition required a running head for student papers, so be sure to confirm with your instructor which edition you should follow. Of note, this guide follows the 7th edition.

Running heads are required for professional papers (e.g., manuscripts submitted for publication). Read on for instructions on how to create them.

Are you wondering what is a “running head”? It’s basically a page header at the top of every page. To make this process easier, set your word processor to automatically add these components onto each page. You may want to look for “Header” in the features.

A running head/page header includes two pieces:

• the title of the paper
• page numbers.

Insert page numbers justified to the right-hand side of the APA format paper (do not put p. or pg. in front of the page numbers).

For all pages of the paper, including the APA format title page, include the “TITLE OF YOUR PAPER” justified to the left in capital letters (i.e., the running head). If your full title is long (over 50 characters), the running head title should be a shortened version.

Preparing outlines in APA Format

Outlines are extremely beneficial as they help writers stay organized, determine the scope of the research that needs to be included, and establish headings and subheadings.

There isn’t an official or recommended “APA format for outline” structure. It is up to the writer (if they choose to make use of an outline) to determine how to organize it and the characters to include. Some writers use a mix of roman numerals, numbers, and uppercase and lowercase letters.

Even though there isn’t a required or recommended APA format for an outline, we encourage writers to make use of one. Who wouldn’t want to put together a rough outline of their project? We promise you, an outline will help you stay on track.

Here’s our version of how APA format for outlines could look:

Don’t forget, if you’re looking for information on APA citation format and other related topics, check out our other comprehensive guides.

How to form an abstract in APA

An APA format abstract (p. 38) is a summary of a scholarly article or scientific study. Scholarly articles and studies are rather lengthy documents, and abstracts allow readers to first determine if they’d like to read an article in its entirety or not.

You may come across abstracts while researching a topic. Many databases display abstracts in the search results and often display them before showing the full text of an article or scientific study. It is important to create a high quality abstract that accurately communicates the purpose and goal of your paper, as readers will determine if it is worthy to continue reading or not.

Are you wondering if you need to create an abstract for your assignment? Usually, student papers do not require an abstract. Abstracts are not typically seen in class assignments, and are usually only included when submitting a paper for publication. Unless your teacher or professor asked for it, you probably don’t need to have one for your class assignment.

If you’re planning on submitting your paper to a journal for publication, first check the journal’s website to learn about abstract and APA paper format requirements.

Here are some helpful suggestions to create a dynamic abstract:

• Abstracts are found on their own page, directly after the title or cover page.
• Professional papers only (not student papers): Include the running head on the top of the page.
• On the first line of the page, center the word “Abstract” (but do not include quotation marks).
• On the following line, write a summary of the key points of your research. Your abstract summary is a way to introduce readers to your research topic, the questions that will be answered, the process you took, and any findings or conclusions you drew. Use concise, brief, informative language. You only have a few sentences to share the summary of your entire document, so be direct with your wording.
• This summary should not be indented, but should be double-spaced and less than 250 words.
• If applicable, help researchers find your work in databases by listing keywords from your paper after your summary. To do this, indent and type Keywords : in italics.  Then list your keywords that stand out in your research. You can also include keyword strings that you think readers will type into the search box.
• Active voice: The subjects reacted to the medication.
• Passive voice: There was a reaction from the subjects taking the medication.
• Instead of evaluating your project in the abstract, simply report what it contains.
• If a large portion of your work includes the extension of someone else’s research, share this in the abstract and include the author’s last name and the year their work was released.

APA format example page:

Here’s an example of an abstract:

Visual design is a critical aspect of any web page or user interface, and its impact on a user’s experience has been studied extensively. Research has shown a positive correlation between a user’s perceived usability and a user’s assessment of visual design. Additionally, perceived web quality, which encompasses visual design, has a positive relationship with both initial and continued consumer purchase intention. However, visual design is often assessed using self-report scale, which are vulnerable to a few pitfalls. Because self-report questionnaires are often reliant on introspection and honesty, it is difficult to confidently rely on self-report questionnaires to make important decisions. This study aims to ensure the validity of a visual design assessment instrument (Visual Aesthetics of Websites Inventory: Short version) by examining its relationship with biometric (variables), like galvanic skin response, pupillometry, and fixation information. Our study looked at participants assessment of a webpage’s visual design, and compared it to their biometric responses while viewing the webpage. Overall, we found that both average fixation duration and pupil dilation differed when participants viewed web pages with lower visual design ratings compared to web pages with a higher visual design rating.

Keywords : usability, visual design, websites, eye tracking, pupillometry, self-report, VisAWI

The body of an APA paper

On the page after the title page (if a student paper) or the abstract (if a professional paper), begin with the body of the paper.

Most papers follow this format:

• At the top of the page, add the page number in the upper right corner of all pages, including the title page.
• On the next line write the title in bold font and center it. Do not underline or italicize it.
• Begin with the introduction and indent the first line of the paragraph. All paragraphs in the body are indented.

Sample body for a student paper:

Most scientific or professional papers have additional sections and guidelines:

• Start with the running head (title + page number). The heading title should be in capital letters. The abstract page should be page 2.
• The introduction presents the problem and premise upon which the research was based. It goes into more detail about this problem than the abstract.
• Begin a new section with the Method and use this word as the subtitle. Bold and center this subtitle. The Method section shows how the study was run and conducted. Be sure to describe the methods through which data was collected.
• Begin a new section with the Results . Bold and center this subtitle. The Results section summarizes your data. Use charts and graphs to display this data.
• Draw conclusions and support how your data led to these conclusions.
• Discuss whether or not your hypothesis was confirmed or not supported by your results.
• Determine the limitations of the study and next steps to improve research for future studies.

Sample body for a professional paper:

Keep in mind, APA citation format is much easier than you think, thanks to EasyBib.com. Try our automatic generator and watch how we create APA citation format references for you in just a few clicks. While you’re at it, take a peek at our other helpful guides, such as our APA reference page guide, to make sure you’re on track with your research papers.

Proper usage of headings & subheadings in APA Format

Headings (p. 47) serve an important purpose in research papers — they organize your paper and make it simple to locate different pieces of information. In addition, headings provide readers with a glimpse to the main idea, or content, they are about to read.

In APA format, there are five levels of headings, each with a different formatting:

• This is the title of your paper
• The title should be centered in the middle of the page
• The title should be bolded
• Use uppercase and lowercase letters where necessary (called title capitalization)
• Place this heading against the left margin
• Use bold letters
• Use uppercase and lowercase letters where necessary
• Place this heading against the left side margin
• End the heading with a period
• Indented in from the left margin

Following general formatting rules, all headings are double spaced and there are no extra lines or spaces between sections.

Here is a visual APA format template for levels of headings:

Use of graphics (tables and figures) in APA Format

If you’re looking to jazz up your project with any charts, tables, drawings, or images, there are certain APA format rules (pp. 195-250) to follow.

First and foremost, the only reason why any graphics should be added is to provide the reader with an easier way to see or read information, rather than typing it all out in the text.

Lots of numbers to discuss? Try organizing your information into a chart or table. Pie charts, bar graphs, coordinate planes, and line graphs are just a few ways to show numerical data, relationships between numbers, and many other types of information.

Instead of typing out long, drawn out descriptions, create a drawing or image. Many visual learners would appreciate the ability to look at an image to make sense of information.

Before you go ahead and place that graphic in your paper, here are a few key guidelines:

• Follow them in the appropriate numerical order in which they appear in the text of your paper. Example : Figure 1, Figure 2, Table 1, Figure 3.
• Example: Figure 1, Figure 2, Table 1, Figure 3
• Only use graphics if they will supplement the material in your text. If they reinstate what you already have in your text, then it is not necessary to include a graphic.
• Include enough wording in the graphic so that the reader is able to understand its meaning, even if it is isolated from the corresponding text. However, do not go overboard with adding a ton of wording in your graphic.
• Left align tables and figures

In our APA format sample paper , you’ll find examples of tables after the references. You may also place tables and figures within the text just after it is mentioned.

Is there anything better than seeing a neatly organized data table? We think not! If you have tons of numbers or data to share, consider creating a table instead of typing out a wordy paragraph. Tables are pretty easy to whip up on Google Docs or Microsoft Word.

General format of a table should be:

• Table number
• Choose to type out your data OR create a table. As stated above, in APA format, you shouldn’t have the information typed out in your paper and also have a table showing the same exact information. Choose one or the other.
• If you choose to create a table, discuss it very briefly in the text. Say something along the lines of, “Table 1 displays the amount of money used towards fighting Malaria.” Or, “Stomach cancer rates are displayed in Table 4.”
• If you’re submitting your project for a class, place your table close to the text where it’s mentioned. If you’re submitting it to be published in a journal, most publishers prefer tables to be placed in the back. If you’re unsure where to place your tables, ask!
• Include the table number first and at the top. Table 1 is the first table discussed in the paper. Table 2 is the next table mentioned, and so on. This should be in bold.
• Add a title under the number. Create a brief, descriptive title. Capitalize the first letter for each important word. Italicize the title and place it under the table number.
• Only use horizontal lines.
• Limit use of cell shading.
• Keep the font at 12-point size and use single or double spacing. If you use single spacing in one table, make sure all of the others use single spaces as well. Keep it consistent.
• All headings should be centered.
• In the first column (called the stub), center the heading, left-align the information underneath it (indent 0.15 inches if info is more than one line).
• Information in other columns should be centered.
• General . Information about the whole table.
• Specific . Information targeted for a specific column, row, or cell.
• Probability . Explains what certain table symbols mean. For example, asterisks,  p values, etc.

Here’s an APA format example of a table:

We know putting together a table is pretty tricky. That’s why we’ve included not one, but a few tables on this page. Scroll down and look at the additional tables in the essay in APA format example found below.

Figures represent information in a visual way. They differ from tables in that they are visually appealing. Sure, tables, like the one above, can be visually appealing, but it’s the color, circles, arrows, boxes, or icons included that make a figure a “figure.”

There are many commonly used figures in papers. Examples APA Format:

• Photographs
• Hierarchy charts

General format of a figure is the same as tables. This means each should include:

• Figure number

Use the same formatting tables use for the number, title, and note.

Here are some pointers to keep in mind when it comes to APA format for figures:

• Only include a figure if it adds value to your paper. If it will truly help with understanding, include it!
• Either include a figure OR write it all out in the text. Do not include the same information twice.
• If a note is added, it should clearly explain the content of the figure. Include any reference information if it’s reproduced or adapted.

APA format sample of a figure:

Photographs:

We live in a world where we have tons of photographs available at our fingertips.

Photographs found through Google Images, social media, stock photos made available from subscription sites, and tons of other various online sources make obtaining photographs a breeze. We can even pull out our cell phones, and in just a few seconds, take pictures with our cameras.

Photographs are simple to find, and because of this, many students enjoy using them in their papers.

If you have a photograph you would like to include in your project, here are some guidelines from the American Psychological Association.

• Create a reference for the photograph. Follow the guidelines under the table and figure sections above.
• Do not use color photos. It is recommended to use black and white. Colors can change depending on the reader’s screen resolution. Using black and white ensures the reader will be able to view the image clearly. The only time it is recommended to use color photos is if you’re writing about color-specific things. For example, if you’re discussing the various shades of leaf coloration, you may want to include a few photographs of colorful leaves.
• If there are sections of the photograph that are not related to your work, it is acceptable to crop them out. Cropping is also beneficial in that it helps the reader focus on the main item you’re discussing.
• If you choose to include an image of a person you know, it would be respectful if you ask their permission before automatically including their photo in your paper.  Some schools and universities post research papers online and some people prefer that their photos and information stay off the Internet.

B. Writing Style Tips

Writing a paper for scientific topics is much different than writing for English, literature, and other composition classes. Science papers are much more direct, clear, and concise. This section includes key suggestions, explains how to write in APA format, and includes other tidbits to keep in mind while formulating your research paper.

Verb usage in APA

Research experiments and observations rely on the creation and analysis of data to test hypotheses and come to conclusions. While sharing and explaining the methods and results of studies, science writers often use verbs.

When using verbs in writing, make sure that you continue to use them in the same tense throughout the section you’re writing. Further details are in the publication manual (p. 117).

Here’s an APA format example:

We tested the solution to identify the possible contaminants.

It wouldn’t make sense to add this sentence after the one above:

We tested the solution to identify the possible contaminants. Researchers often test solutions by placing them under a microscope.

Notice that the first sentence is in the past tense while the second sentence is in the present tense. This can be confusing for readers.

For verbs in scientific papers, the APA manual recommends using:

• Past tense or present perfect tense for the explantation of the procedure
• Past tense for the explanation of the results
• Present tense for the explanation of the conclusion and future implications

If this is all a bit much, and you’re simply looking for help with your references, try the EasyBib.com APA format generator . Our APA formatter creates your references in just a few clicks. APA citation format is easier than you think thanks to our innovative, automatic tool.

Even though your writing will not have the same fluff and detail as other forms of writing, it should not be boring or dull to read. The Publication Manual suggests thinking about who will be the main reader of your work and to write in a way that educates them.

How to reduce bias & labels

The American Psychological Association strongly objects to any bias towards gender, racial groups, ages of individuals or subjects, disabilities, and sexual orientation (pp. 131-149). If you’re unsure whether your writing is free of bias and labels or not, have a few individuals read your work to determine if it’s acceptable.

Here are a few guidelines that the American Psychological Association suggests :

• Only include information about an individual’s orientation or characteristic if it is important to the topic or study. Do not include information about individuals or labels if it is not necessary.
• If writing about an individual’s characteristic or orientation, for essay APA format, make sure to put the person first. Instead of saying, “Diabetic patients,” say, “Patients who are diabetic.”
• Instead of using narrow terms such as, “adolescents,” or “the elderly,” try to use broader terms such as, “participants,” and “subjects.”
• “They” or “their” are acceptable gender-neutral pronouns to use.
• Be mindful when using terms that end with “man” or “men” if they involve subjects who are female. For example, instead of using “Firemen,” use the term, “Firefighter.” In general, avoid ambiguity.
• When referring to someone’s racial or ethnic identity, use the census category terms and capitalize the first letter. Also, avoid using the word, “minority,” as it can be interpreted as meaning less than or deficient. Instead, say “people of color” or “underrepresented groups.”
• When describing subjects in APA format, use the words “girls” and “boys” for children who are under the age of 12. The terms, “young woman,” “young man,” “female adolescent,” and “male adolescent” are appropriate for subjects between 13-17 years old; “Men,” and “women,” for those older than 18. Use the term, “older adults.” for individuals who are older. “Elderly,” and “senior,” are not acceptable if used only as nouns. It is acceptable to use these terms if they’re used as adjectives.

Read through our example essay in APA format, found in section D, to see how we’ve reduced bias and labels.

Spelling in APA Format

• In APA formatting, use the same spelling as words found in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (American English) (p. 161).
• If the word you’re trying to spell is not found in Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, a second resource is Webster’s Third New International Dictionary .
• If attempting to properly spell words in the psychology field, consult the American Psychological Association’s Dictionary of Psychology

Thanks to helpful tools and features, such as the spell checker, in word processing programs, most of us think we have everything we need right in our document. However, quite a few helpful features are found elsewhere.

Where can you find a full grammar editor? Right here, on EasyBib.com. The EasyBib Plus paper checker scans your paper for spelling, but also for any conjunction , determiner, or adverb out of place. Try it out and unlock the magic of an edited paper.

Abbreviation do’s and don’ts in APA Format

Abbreviations can be tricky. You may be asking yourself, “Do I include periods between the letters?” “Are all letters capitalized?” “Do I need to write out the full name each and every time?” Not to worry, we’re breaking down the publication manual’s abbreviations (p. 172) for you here.

First and foremost, use abbreviations sparingly.

Too many and you’re left with a paper littered with capital letters mashed together. Plus, they don’t lend themselves to smooth and easy reading. Readers need to pause and comprehend the meaning of abbreviations and quite often stumble over them.

• If the abbreviation is used less than three times in the paper, type it out each time. It would be pretty difficult to remember what an abbreviation or acronym stands for if you’re writing a lengthy paper.
• If you decide to sprinkle in abbreviations,  it is not necessary to include periods between the letters.
• Example: While it may not affect a patient’s short-term memory (STM), it may affect their ability to comprehend new terms. Patients who experience STM loss while using the medication should discuss it with their doctor.
• Example : AIDS
• The weight in pounds exceeded what we previously thought.

Punctuation in APA Format

One space after most punctuation marks.

The manual recommends using one space after most punctuation marks, including punctuation at the end of a sentence (p. 154). It doesn’t hurt to double check with your teacher or professor to ask their preference since this rule was changed recently (in 2020).

The official APA format book was primarily created to aid individuals with submitting their paper for publication in a professional journal. Many schools adopt certain parts of the handbook and modify sections to match their preference. To see an example of an APA format research paper, with the spacing we believe is most commonly and acceptable to use, scroll down and see section D.

For more information related to the handbook, including frequently asked questions, and more, here’s further reading on the style

It’s often a heated debate among writers whether or not to use an Oxford comma (p. 155), but for this style, always use an Oxford comma. This type of comma is placed before the words AND and OR or in a series of three items.

Example of APA format for commas: The medication caused drowsiness, upset stomach, and fatigue.

Here’s another example: The subjects chose between cold, room temperature, or warm water.

Apostrophes

When writing a possessive singular noun, you should place the apostrophe before the s. For possessive plural nouns, the apostrophe is placed after the s.

• Singular : Linda Morris’s jacket
• Plural : The Morris’ house

Em dashes (long dash) are used to bring focus to a particular point or an aside. There are no spaces after these dashes (p. 157).

Use en dashes (short dash) in compound adjectives. Do not place a space before or after the dash. Here are a few examples:

• custom-built
• 12-year-old

Number rules in APA Format

Science papers often include the use of numbers, usually displayed in data, tables, and experiment information. The golden rule to keep in mind is that numbers less than 10 are written out in text. If the number is more than 10, use numerals.

APA format examples:

• 14 kilograms
• seven individuals
• 83 years old
• Fourth grade

The golden rule for numbers has exceptions.

In APA formatting, use numerals if you are:

• Showing numbers in a table or graph
• 4 divided by 2
• 6-month-olds

Use numbers written out as words if you are:

• Ninety-two percent of teachers feel as though….
• Hundred Years’ War
• One-sixth of the students

Other APA formatting number rules to keep in mind:

• World War II
• Super Bowl LII
• It’s 1980s, not 1980’s!

Additional number rules can be found in the publication manual (p. 178)

Need help with other writing topics? Our plagiarism checker is a great resource for anyone looking for writing help. Say goodbye to an out of place noun , preposition , or adjective, and hello to a fully edited paper.

Overview of APA references

While writing a research paper, it is always important to give credit and cite your sources; this lets you acknowledge others’ ideas and research you’ve used in your own work. Not doing so can be considered plagiarism , possibly leading to a failed grade or loss of a job.

APA style is one of the most commonly used citation styles used to prevent plagiarism. Here’s more on crediting sources . Let’s get this statement out of the way before you become confused: An APA format reference and an APA format citation are two different things! We understand that many teachers and professors use the terms as if they’re synonyms, but according to this specific style, they are two separate things, with different purposes, and styled differently.

A reference displays all of the information about the source — the title, the author’s name, the year it was published, the URL, all of it! References are placed on the final page of a research project.

Here’s an example of a reference:

Wynne-Jones, T. (2015). The emperor of any place . Candlewick Press.

An APA format citation is an APA format in-text citation. These are found within your paper, anytime a quote or paraphrase is included. They usually only include the name of the author and the date the source was published.

Here’s an example of one:

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is even discussed in the book, The Emperor of Any Place . The main character, Evan, finds a mysterious diary on his father’s desk (the same desk his father died on, after suffering from a hypertrophic cardiomyopathy attack). Evan unlocks the truth to his father and grandfather’s past (Wynne-Jones, 2015).

Both of the ways to credit another individual’s work — in the text of a paper and also on the final page — are key to preventing plagiarism. A writer must use both types in a paper. If you cite something in the text, it must have a full reference on the final page of the project. Where there is one, there must be the other!

Now that you understand that, here’s some basic info regarding APA format references (pp. 281-309).

• Each reference is organized, or structured, differently. It all depends on the source type. A book reference is structured one way, an APA journal is structured a different way, a newspaper article is another way. Yes, it’s probably frustrating that not all references are created equal and set up the same way. MLA works cited pages are unique in that every source type is formatted the same way. Unfortunately, this style is quite different.
• Most references follow this general format:

Author’s Last name, First initial. Middle initial. (Year published). Title of source . URL.

Again, as stated in the above paragraph, you must look up the specific source type you’re using to find out the placement of the title, author’s name, year published, etc.

For more information on APA format for sources and how to reference specific types of sources, use the other guides on EasyBib.com. Here’s another useful site .

Looking for a full visual of a page of references? Scroll down and take a peek at our APA format essay example towards the bottom of this page. You’ll see a list of references and you can gain a sense of how they look.

Bonus: here’s a link to more about the fundamentals related to this particular style. If you want to brush up or catch up on the Modern Language Association’s style, here’s a great resource on how to cite websites in MLA .

In-text APA citation format

Did you find the perfect quote or piece of information to include in your project? Way to go! It’s always a nice feeling when we find that magical piece of data or info to include in our writing. You probably already know that you can’t just copy and paste it into your project, or type it in, without also providing credit to the original author.

Displaying where the original information came from is much easier than you think.Directly next to the quote or information you included, place the author’s name and the year nearby. This allows the reader of your work to see where the information originated.

APA allows for the use of two different forms of in-text citation, parenthetical and narrative Both forms of citation require two elements:

• author’s name
• year of publication

The only difference is the way that this information is presented to the reader.

Parenthetical citations are the more commonly seen form of in-text citations for academic work, in which both required reference elements are presented at the end of the sentence in parentheses. Example:

Harlem had many artists and musicians in the late 1920s (Belafonte, 2008).

Narrative citations allow the author to present one or both of the required reference elements inside of the running sentence, which prevents the text from being too repetitive or burdensome. When only one of the two reference elements is included in the sentence, the other is provided parenthetically. Example:

According to Belafonte (2008), Harlem was full of artists and musicians in the late 1920s.

If there are two authors listed in the source entry, then the parenthetical reference must list them both:

(Smith & Belafonte, 2008)

If there are three or more authors listed in the source entry, then the parenthetical reference can abbreviate with “et al.”, the latin abbreviation for “and others”:

(Smith et al., 2008)

The author’s names are structured differently if there is more than one author. Things will also look different if there isn’t an author at all (which is sometimes the case with website pages). For more information on APA citation format, check out this page on the topic: APA parenthetical citation and APA in-text citation . There is also more information in the official manual in chapter 8.

If it’s MLA in-text and parenthetical citations you’re looking for, we’ve got your covered there too! You might want to also check out his guide on parenthetical citing .

Would you benefit from having a tool that helps you easily generate citations that are in the text? Check out EasyBib Plus!

References page in APA Format

An APA format reference page is easier to create than you probably think. We go into detail on how to create this page on our APA reference page . We also have a guide for how to create an annotated bibliography in APA . But, if you’re simply looking for a brief overview of the reference page, we’ve got you covered here.

Here are some pointers to keep in mind when it comes to the references page in APA format:

• This VIP page has its very own page. Start on a fresh, clean document (p. 303).
• Center and bold the title “References” (do not include quotation marks, underline, or italicize this title).
• Alphabetize and double-space ALL entries.
• Use a readable font, such as Times New Roman, Arial, Calibri, or Lucida (p. 44).
• Every quote or piece of outside information included in the paper should be referenced and have an entry.
• Even though it’s called a “reference page,” it can be longer than one page. If your references flow onto the next page, then that’s a-okay.
• Only include the running head if it is required by your teacher or you’re writing a professional paper.

Sample reference page for a student paper:

Here’s another friendly reminder to use the EasyBib APA format generator (that comes with EasyBib Plus) to quickly and easily develop every single one of your references for you. Try it out! Our APA formatter is easy to use and ready to use 24/7.

Final APA Format Checklist

Prior to submitting your paper, check to make sure you have everything you need and everything in its place:

• Did you credit all of the information and quotes you used in the body of your paper and show a matching full reference at the end of the paper? Remember, you need both! Need more information on how to credit other authors and sources? Check out our other guides, or use the EasyBib APA format generator to credit your sources quickly and easily. EasyBib.com also has more styles than just the one this page focuses on.
• 12-pt. Times New Roman
• 11-pt. Calibri, Arial, Georgia
• 10-pt. Lucida, Sans Unicode, Computer Modern
• If you created an abstract, is it directly after the title page? Some teachers and professors do not require an abstract, so before you go ahead and include it, make sure it’s something he or she is expecting.
• Professional paper — Did you include a running head on every single page of your project?
• Student paper — Did you include page numbers in the upper right-hand corner of all your pages?
• Are all headings, as in section or chapter titles, properly formatted? If you’re not sure, check section number 9.
• Are all tables and figures aligned properly? Did you include notes and other important information directly below the table or figure? Include any information that will help the reader completely understand everything in the table or figure if it were to stand alone.
• Are abbreviations used sparingly? Did you format them properly?
• Is the entire document double spaced?
• Are all numbers formatted properly? Check section 17, which is APA writing format for numbers.
• Did you glance at the sample paper? Is your assignment structured similarly? Are all of the margins uniform?

Submitting Your APA Paper

Congratulations for making it this far! You’ve put a lot of effort into writing your paper and making sure the t’s are crossed and the i’s are dotted. If you’re planning to submit your paper for a school assignment, make sure you review your teacher or professor’s procedures.

If you’re submitting your paper to a journal, you probably need to include a cover letter.

Most cover letters ask you to include:

• The author’s contact information.
• A statement to the editor that the paper is original.
• If a similar paper exists elsewhere, notify the editor in the cover letter.

Once again, review the specific journal’s website for exact specifications for submission.

Okay, so you’re probably thinking you’re ready to hit send or print and submit your assignment. Can we offer one last suggestion? We promise it will only take a minute.

Consider running your paper through our handy dandy paper checker. It’s pretty simple.

Copy and paste or upload your paper into our checker. Within a minute, we’ll provide feedback on your spelling and grammar. If there’s a pronoun , interjection , or verb out of place, we’ll highlight it and offer suggestions for improvement. We’ll even take it a step further and point out any instances of possible plagiarism.

If it sounds too good to be true, then head on over to our innovative tool and give it a whirl. We promise you won’t be disappointed.

What is APA Format?

APA stands for the American Psychological Association . In this guide, you’ll find information related to “What is APA format?” in relation to writing and organizing your paper according to the American Psychological Association’s standards. Information on how to cite sources can be found on our APA citation page. The official American Psychological Association handbook was used as a reference for our guide and we’ve included page numbers from the manual throughout. However, this page is not associated with the association.

You’ll most likely use APA format if your paper is on a scientific topic. Many behavioral and social sciences use this organization’s standards and guidelines.

What are behavioral sciences? Behavioral sciences study human and animal behavior. They can include:

• Cognitive Science
• Neuroscience

What are social sciences? Social sciences focus on one specific aspect of human behavior, specifically social and cultural relationships. Social sciences can include:

• Anthropology
• Political Science
• Human Geography
• Archaeology
• Linguistics

What’s New in the 7th Edition?

This citation style was created by the American Psychological Association. Its rules and guidelines can be found in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association . The information provided in the guide above follows the 6th edition (2009) of the manual. The 7th edition was published in 2020 and is the most recent version.

The 7th edition of the Publication Manual is in full color and includes 12 sections (compared to 8 sections in the 6th edition). In general, this new edition differentiates between professional and student papers, includes guidance with accessibility in mind, provides new examples to follow, and has updated guidelines.We’ve selected a few notable updates below, but for a full view of all of the 7th edition changes visit the style’s website linked here .

• Paper title
• Student name
• Affiliation (e.g., school, department, etc.)
• Course number and title
• Course instructor
• 6th edition – Running head: SMARTPHONE EFFECTS ON ADOLESCENT SOCIALIZATION
• 7th edition – SMARTPHONE EFFECTS ON ADOLESCENT SOCIALIZATION
• Pronouns . “They” can be used as a gender-neutral pronoun.
• Bias-free language guidelines . There are updated and new sections on guidelines for this section. New sections address participation in research, socioeconomic status, and intersectionality.
• Spacing after sentences. Add only a single space after end punctuation.
• Tables and figures . The citing format is now streamlined so that both tables and figures should include a name and number above the table/figure, and a note underneath the table/figure.
• 6th ed. – (Ikemoto, Richardson, Murphy, Yoshida 2016)
• 7th ed. – (Ikemoto et al., 2016)
• Citing books. The location of the publisher can be omitted. Also, e-books no longer need to mention the format (e.g., Kindle, etc.)
• Example: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42255-019-0153-5
• Using URLs. URLs no longer need to be prefaced by the words “Retrieved from.”

New citing information . There is new guidance on citing classroom or intranet resources, and oral traditions or traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples.

Visit our EasyBib Twitter feed to discover more citing tips, fun grammar facts, and the latest product updates.

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) (2020). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

Published October 31, 2011. Updated May 14, 2020.

Written and edited by Michele Kirschenbaum and Elise Barbeau. Michele Kirschenbaum is a school library media specialist and the in-house librarian at EasyBib.com. Elise Barbeau is the Citation Specialist at Chegg. She has worked in digital marketing, libraries, and publishing.

APA Formatting Guide

APA Formatting

• Annotated Bibliography
• Block Quotes
• et al Usage
• Multiple Authors
• Paraphrasing
• Page Numbers
• Parenthetical Citations
• Sample Paper
• View APA Guide

Citation Examples

• Book Chapter
• Journal Article
• Magazine Article
• Newspaper Article
• Website (no author)
• View all APA Examples

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We should not use “et al.” in APA reference list entries. If the number of authors in the source is up to and including 20, list all author names and use an ampersand (&) before the final author’s name. If the number of authors is more than 20, list the first 19 authors’ names followed by an ellipsis (but no ampersand), and then add the final author’s name. An example of author names in a reference entry having more than 20 authors is given below:

Author Surname1, F. M., Author Surname2, F. M., Author Surname3, F. M., Author Surname4, F. M., Author Surname5, F. M., Author Surname6, F. M., Author Surname7, F. M., Author Surname8, F. M., Author Surname9, F. M., Author Surname10, F. M., Author Surname11, F. M., Author Surname12, F. M., Author Surname13, F. M., Author Surname14, F. M., Author Surname15, F. M., Author Surname16, F. M., Author Surname17, F. M., Author Surname18, F. M., Author Surname19, F. M., . . .  Last Author Surname, F. M. (Publication Year).

Alvarez, L. D., Peach, J. L., Rodriguez, J. F., Donald, L., Thomas, M., Aruck, A., Samy, K., Anthony, K., Ajey, M., Rodriguez, K. L., Katherine, K., Vincent, A., Pater, F., Somu, P., Pander, L., Berd, R., Fox, L., Anders, A., Kamala, W., . . . Nicole Jones, K. (2019).

Note that, unlike references with 2 to 20 author names, the symbol “&” is not used here before the last author’s name.

APA 7, released in October 2019, has some new updates. Here is a brief description of the updates made in APA 7.

Different types of papers and best practices are given in detail in Chapter 1.

How to format a student title page is explained in Chapter 2. Examples of a professional paper and a student paper are included.

Chapter 3 provides additional information on qualitative and mixed methods of research.

An update on writing style is included in Chapter 4.

In chapter 5, some best practices for writing with bias-free language are included.

Chapter 6 gives some updates on style elements including using a single space after a period, including a citation with an abbreviation, the treatment of numbers in abstracts, treatment for different types of lists, and the formatting of gene and protein names.

In Chapter 7, additional examples are given for tables and figures for different types of publications.

In Chapter 8, how to format quotations and how to paraphrase text are covered with additional examples. A simplified version of in-text citations is clearly illustrated.

Chapter 9 has many updates: listing all author names up to 20 authors, standardizing DOIs and URLs, and the formatting of an annotated bibliography.

Chapter 10 includes many examples with templates for all reference types. New rules covering the inclusion of the issue number for journals and the omission of publisher location from book references are provided. Explanations of how to cite YouTube videos, power point slides, and TED talks are included.

Chapter 11 includes many legal references for easy understanding.

Chapter 12 provides advice for authors on how to promote their papers.

For more information on some of the changes found in APA 7, check out this EasyBib article .

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APA Style: APA Style: Overview

What is apa style.

The American Psychological Association (APA) developed a set of standards that writers in the social sciences follow to create consistency throughout publications. These rules address:

• crediting sources
• document formatting
• writing style and organization

APA's guidelines assist readers in recognizing a writer's ideas and information, rather than having to adjust to inconsistent formatting. In this way, APA allows writers to express themselves clearly and easily to readers. The APA materials developed in the Walden Writing Center are based on The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition , often referred to on this website as "APA 7" or "the APA manual."

Why APA Style?

When you are writing as a student, you are entering into a new writing community ; just as you would need to learn the customs and rules of any new country you visit, you need to learn the customs and rules of academic writing. These guidelines will be different than guidelines for writing in other environments (such as letters to friends, emails to coworkers, or writing for blogs). The academic community has its own rules. These standards help writers

• improve clarity
• avoid distracting the reader
• indicate sources for evidence
• provide uniform formatting

To learn more about transitioning into academic writing, view "What Is Academic Writing?" Remember that it’s your job as the author to engage your readers, and inconsistencies in formatting and citations distract the reader from the content of your writing. By using APA style, you allow your readers to focus on the ideas you are presenting, offering a familiar format to discuss your new ideas.

Getting Started With APA Style

APA style can seem overwhelming at first. To get started, take some time to look through these resources:

• Familiarize yourself with the column on the left; peruse the different pages to see what APA has to say about citations, reference entries, capitalization, numbers, et cetera.
• Find our APA templates , determining which is the most appropriate for your assignments (hint: the first "Course Paper" template is best for most course assignments).
• Use this APA Checklist to review your assignments, ensuring you have remembered all of APA's rules.
• If you previously used the 6th edition of APA, visit our APA 6 and APA 7 Comparison Tables to learn what’s new in the 7th edition.
• Review one of our APA webinars (like "How and When to Include APA Citations" ), based on your interest.
• Find the APA resources in our APA Scavenger Hunt , helping to familiarize yourself with the APA resources we have on the website.
• Check out our APA-related blog posts .

Lastly, have a question? Ask OASIS !

Crash Course in APA Style Video

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APA Style (7th ed.)

• Getting Started
• Formatting Your Paper
• Elements of Citation
• In-Text Citations
• Reference List
• Annotated Bibliographies
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Generated Text
• Business Sources
• Government Documents
• Journal Articles
• Lecture Notes, PowerPoint Slides, Handouts
• Media Kits, Press Releases
• Newspapers & Magazines
• Personal Communication
• Oral Communications with Indigenous Elders & Knowledge Keepers
• Social Media
• Software & Computer Code
• Tables & Figures
• Videos & Film
• APA Resources

Getting Started with APA Style, 7th ed.

About this guide.

This guide offers a variety of examples for different types of sources commonly used in academic assignments. Examples are based on our interpretation of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th edition. You can also view APA's official Style & Grammar Guidelines online.

Your professor may have different citing expectations than the rules outlined in this guide. Always check at the beginning of term and before starting assignments that the citing rules you are using are appropriate for your class.

Tutoring and library staff can answer questions about citing your sources, and can help clarify citation rules. Our role is to help students learn how to cite. Students are responsible for proofreading their own citations.

Book a Citation Appointment  ​

Appointments with English/Writing Tutors or AIR Specialists can be booked through TutorOcean.

• Last Updated: May 7, 2024 12:30 PM
• URL: https://sheridancollege.libguides.com/apa

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What is APA Citation Style?

APA Style is a set of guidelines for writing, formatting research papers and assignments, and referencing sources. When citing in APA, you need to cite all the sources that you have used within the body of your work (in-text citation), and in the References List at the end of your essay or assignment. Seneca Libraries citation support and resources are based on the latest edition of the APA Publication Manual (7th edition).

• See the  citation examples  tab for guidelines on how to cite a variety of sources in APA
• See the APA Citation FAQs for answers to common APA questions
• Check out a  video and infographic which highlights major changes in APA Style 7th edition

  Academic Integrity Badges: For information and questions about earning badges, please see Academic Integrity: Student Resources , or contact [email protected].

Online Citation Workshops

Attend a live workshop to learn about the basics of citing your sources and get answers to your citation questions . (Note: We encourage students to join before the workshop start time as a courtesy to other attendees)    

Can't attend a workshop? View the   APA   |   MLA   |  APA & MLA   recording , or view the p resentation slides:  APA  |  MLA  |  APA & MLA

• Sample Papers
• Setting Up Your Paper
• Annotated Bibliography
• Common Mistakes

Note: To edit the templates in Google Docs, upload them into your Google Drive and open as a Google doc.

• APA 7th ed. Sample Paper (Seneca example)
• APA 7th ed. Sample Paper - Group Assignment (Seneca example)
• APA 7th ed. Sample Paper - With Figures (Seneca Example)
• APA 7th ed. Sample Paper - With Appendix (Seneca Example)
• APA Checklist Finished your assignment? Use this checklist to ensure you haven't missed information needed for APA Style.

Tips for formatting your APA Style paper

Margins : Add 1 inch margins on all sides.

Header : Starting with your title page, add page numbers at the top right corner of the page. 

Line Spacing : Double-space your text.

Paragraph Alignment & Indentation : Indent the first line of each paragraph by 0.5 inch. Align your paragraphs to the left margin.

Recommended Fonts:  Unless specified by your instructor, APA recommends the following fonts:

• 11-point Calibri
• 11-point Arial
• 10-point Lucida Sans Unicode
• 12-point Times New Roman
• 11-point Georgia
• 10-point Computer Modern
• Heading Levels (APA Style) If your instructor requires you to use APA Style headings and sub-headings, this document will show you how they work.
• Annotated Bibliography Guide An overview to writing an annotated bibliography and APA annotated bibliography template.

Live Citation Chat

Note: This citation guide is based on the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). The contents are accurate to the best of our knowledge. Some examples illustrate Seneca Libraries' recommendations and are marked as modifications of the official APA guidelines. 

This work is licensed under a  Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License . It is used/adapted with the permission of Seneca Libraries. For information please contact  [email protected] . When copying this guide, please retain this box.

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• Last Updated: Jun 25, 2024 5:07 PM
• URL: https://library.senecapolytechnic.ca/apa

• Plagiarism and grammar
• Citation guides

APA Citation Generator

Don't let plagiarism errors spoil your paper, a comprehensive guide to apa citations and format, overview of this guide:.

This page provides you with an overview of APA format, 7th edition. Included is information about referencing, various citation formats with examples for each source type, and other helpful information.

If you’re looking for MLA format , check out the Citation Machine MLA Guide. Also, visit the Citation Machine homepage to use the APA formatter, which is an APA citation generator, and to see more styles .

Being responsible while researching

When you’re writing a research paper or creating a research project, you will probably use another individual’s work to help develop your own assignment. A good researcher or scholar uses another individual’s work in a responsible way. This involves indicating that the work of other individuals is included in your project (i.e., citing), which is one way to prevent plagiarism.

Plagiarism? What is it?

The word plagiarism is derived from the Latin word, plagiare , which means “to kidnap.” The term has evolved over the years to now mean the act of taking another individual’s work and using it as your own, without acknowledging the original author (American Psychological Association, 2020 p. 21). Plagiarism can be illegal and there can be serious ramifications for plagiarizing someone else’s work. Thankfully, plagiarism can be prevented. One way it can be prevented is by including citations and references in your research project. Want to make them quickly and easily? Try the Citation Machine citation generator, which is found on our homepage.

All about citations & references

Citations and references should be included anytime you use another individual’s work in your own assignment. When including a quote, paraphrased information, images, or any other piece of information from another’s work, you need to show where you found it by including a citation and a reference. This guide explains how to make them.

APA style citations are added in the body of a research paper or project and references are added to the last page.

Citations , which are called in-text citations, are included when you’re adding information from another individual’s work into your own project. When you add text word-for-word from another source into your project, or take information from another source and place it in your own words and writing style (known as paraphrasing), you create an in-text citation. These citations are short in length and are placed in the main part of your project, directly after the borrowed information.

References are found at the end of your research project, usually on the last page. Included on this reference list page is the full information for any in-text citations found in the body of the project. These references are listed in alphabetical order by the author's last name.

An APA in-text citation includes only three items: the last name(s) of the author(s), the year the source was published, and sometimes the page or location of the information. References include more information such as the name of the author(s), the year the source was published, the full title of the source, and the URL or page range.

Why is it important to include citations & references

Including APA citations and references in your research projects is a very important component of the research process. When you include citations, you’re being a responsible researcher. You’re showing readers that you were able to find valuable, high-quality information from other sources, place them into your project where appropriate, all while acknowledging the original authors and their work.

Common ways students and scholars accidentally plagiarize

Believe it or not, there are instances when you could attempt to include in-text and full references in the appropriate places, but still accidentally plagiarize. Here are some common mistakes to be aware of:

Mistake #1 - Misquoting sources: If you plan to use a direct quote, make sure you copy it exactly as is. Sure, you can use part of the full quote or sentence, but if you decide to put quotation marks around any words, those words should match exactly what was found in the original source. Here’s a line from The Little Prince , by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.”

Here’s an acceptable option:

“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves,” stated de Saint-Exupéry (1943, p. 3).

Here’s a misquote:

“Grown-ups barely ever understand anything by themselves,” stated de Saint-Exupéry (1943, p. 3).

Notice the slight change in the words. The incorrect phrasing is an instance of accidental plagiarism.

Mistake #2 - Problems with paraphrasing: When we paraphrase, we restate information using our own words and writing style. It’s not acceptable to substitute words from the original source with synonyms.

Let’s use the same sentence from The Little Prince .

A correct paraphrase could be:

de Saint-Exupéry (1943) shares various ways adults frustrate children. One of the biggest being that kids have to explain everything. It’s too bad adults are unable to comprehend anything on their own (p. 3).

An incorrect paraphrase would be:

de Saint-Exupéry (1943) shares that adults never understand anything by themselves, and it is exhausting for kids to be always and forever clarifying things to them (p.3).

Notice how close the incorrect paraphrase is from the original. This is an instance of accidental plagiarism.

Make sure you quote and paraphrase properly in order to prevent accidental plagiarism.

If you’re having a difficult time paraphrasing properly, it is acceptable to paraphrase part of the text AND use a direct quote. Here’s an example:

de Saint-Exupery (1943) shares various ways adults frustrate children. One of the biggest being that kids have to explain everything, and “it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them” (p. 3).

Information About APA

Who created it.

The American Psychological Association is an organization created for individuals in the psychology field. With close to 121,000 members, they provide educational opportunities, funding, guidance, and research information for everything psychology-related. They also have numerous high-quality databases, peer-reviewed journals, and books that revolve around mental health.

The American Psychological Association is also credited with creating their own specific citation and reference style. Today, this format is used by individuals not only in the psychology field, but many other subject areas as well. Education, economics, business, and social sciences also use APA style quite frequently. Click here for more information . This guide covers general information about the style, but is not affiliated with the American Psychological Association.

Why was this style created?

This format was first developed in 1929 to form a standardized way for researchers in science fields to document their sources. Prior to the inception of these standards and guidelines, individuals were recognizing the work of other authors by including bits and pieces of information in random order. There wasn’t a set way to format citations and references. You can probably imagine how difficult it was to understand the sources that were used for research projects!

Having a standard format for citing sources allows readers to glance at a citation or APA reference and easily locate the title, author, year published, and other critical pieces of information needed to understand a source.

The evolution of this style

The guide below is based on APA style 7th edition, which was released in 2020. In previous versions of APA format, researchers and scholars were required to include the publisher location for books and the date that an electronic resource was accessed. Both are no longer required to be included.

Details on the differences between the 6th and 7th editions is addressed later in this guide.

Citations & References

The appearance of citations & references.

The format for references varies, but most use this general format:

%%Author’s Last name, First initial. (Date published). Title . URL

Researchers and scholars must look up the proper format for the source that they’re attempting to cite. Books have a certain format, websites have a different format, periodicals have a different format, and so on. Scroll down to find the proper format for the source you’re citing or referencing.

If you would like help citing your sources, CitationMachine.com has a citation generator that will help make the APA citation process much easier for you. To start, simply click on the source type you're citing:

• Journal articles

In-text citations

An APA in-text citation is included in research projects in three instances: When using a direct quote, paraphrasing information, or simply referring to a piece of information from another source.

Quite often, researchers and scholars use a small amount of text, word for word, from another source and include it in their own research projects. This is done for many reasons. Sometimes, another author’s words are so eloquently written that there isn’t a better way to rephrase it yourself. Other times, the author’s words can help prove a point or establish an understanding for something in your research project. When using another author’s exact words in your research project, include an APA in-text citation directly following it.

In addition to using the exact words from another source and placing them into your project, these citations are also added anytime you paraphrase information. Paraphrasing is when you take information from another source and rephrase it, in your own words.

When simply referring to another piece of information from another source, also include a citation directly following it.

Citations in the text are found near a direct quote, paraphrased information, or next to a mention of another source. To see examples of some narrative/ parenthetical citations in action, look at the image above, under “All About Citations & References.”

Note: *Only include the page or paragraph number when using a direct quote or paraphrase. Page numbers have a p. before the number, pp. before the page range, and para. before the paragraph number. This information is included to help the reader locate the exact portion of text themselves. It is unnecessary to include this information when you’re simply referring to another source.

Examples of APA in-text citations:

“Well, you’re about to enter the land of the free and the brave. And I don’t know how you got that stamp on your passport. The priest must know someone” (Tóibín, 2009, p. 52).

Student teachers who use technology in their lessons tend to continue using technology tools throughout their teaching careers (Kent & Giles, 2017, p. 12).

If including the author’s name in the sentence, place the year in the parentheses directly next to his or her name. Add the page number at the end, unless it’s a source without any pages or paragraph numbers (See Section 8.10 of the Publication manual for more details).

In-text citation APA example:

According to a study done by Kent and Giles (2017), student teachers who use technology in their lessons tend to continue using technology tools throughout their teaching careers.

The full references, or citations, for these sources can be found on the last part of a research project, titled the “References.”

Here’s how to create in-text citations for specific amounts of authors:

APA citation with no author

When the source lacks an author’s name, place the title, year, and page number (if available) in the text. The title should be in italics if it sits alone (such as a movie, brochure, or report). If the source is part of a whole (as many web pages and articles are), place the title in quotation marks without italics (See Section 8.14 of the Publication manual ).

Structure of an APA format citation in the text narratively, with the author's name missing:

Title of Source (Year) or “Title of Source” (Year)

Structure of an APA style format citation, in parentheses at the end of the sentence, with the author’s name missing: (Title of Source, Year) or (“Title of Source,” Year)

Structure for one author

In the text, narratively: Last name of Author (Year)...(page number).

In parentheses, at the end of the sentence: (Last name of Author, Year, page number).

Structure for two authors

Place the authors in the order they appear on the source. Only use the ampersand in the parenthetical citations (see Section 8.17 of the Publication manual ). Use ‘and’ to separate the author names if they’re in the text of the sentence.

In the text, narratively: Last name of Author 1 and Last name of Author 2 (Year)....(page number).

In parentheses, at the end of the sentence: (Last name of Author 1 & Last name of Author 2, Year, page number).

Structure for three or more authors

Only include the first listed author’s name in the first and any subsequent citations. Follow it with et al.

(Last name Author 1 et al., Year, page number)

(Agbayani et al., 2020, p. 99)

Last name of Author 1 et al. (Year)...(page).

Agbayani et al. (2020)...(p. 99)

One author, multiple works, same year

What do you do when you want to cite multiple works by an author, and the sources all written in the same year?

Include the letters ‘a’ ‘b’ ‘c’ and so on after the year in the citation.

(Jackson, 2013a)

Jackson (2013a)

Writers can even lump dates together.

Example: Jackson often studied mammals while in Africa (2013a, 2013b).

On the APA reference page, include the same letters in the full references.

Groups and organizations

Write out the full name of the group or organization in the first citation and place the abbreviation next to it in brackets. If the group or organization is cited again, only include the abbreviation. If it doesn’t have an abbreviation associated with it, write out the entire organization’s name each and every time (see Section 8.21 of the Publication manual ).

First APA citation for an organization with an abbreviation: (World Health Organization [WHO], Year)

World Health Organization (WHO, Year)

Notice in the example directly above, the name of the organization is written out in full in the text of the sentence, and the abbreviation is placed in parentheses next to it.

Subsequent APA citations in the text for an organization with an abbreviation: (WHO, Year) OR WHO (Year)

All citations in the text for an organization without an abbreviation: (Citation Machine, Year) or Citation Machine (Year)

One in-text citation, multiple works

Sometimes you’ll need to cite more than one work within an in-text citation. Follow the same format (author, year) format but place semicolons between works (p. 263).

(Obama, 2016; Monroe et al., 1820; Hoover & Coolidge, 1928)

Reminder: There are many citation tools available on CitationMachine.com. Head to our homepage to learn more, check out our APA citation website, and cite your sources easily! The most useful resource on our website? Our APA citation generator, which doesn’t just create full references, it’s also an APA in-text citation website! It’ll do both for you!

Click here to learn more about crediting work .

Reference list citation components

References display the full information for all the citations found in the body of a research project.

Some things to keep in mind when it comes to the references:

• All references sit together on their own page, which is usually the last page(s) of a paper.
• Title the page ‘References’
• Place ‘References’ in the center of the page and bold it. Keep the title in the same font and size as the references. Do not italicize, underline, place the title in quotation marks, or increase the font size.
• The entire page is double spaced.
• All references are listed in alphabetical order by the first word in the reference, which is usually the author’s last name. If the source lacks an author, alphabetize the source by the title (ignore A, An, or The)
• All references have a hanging indent, meaning that the second line of text is indented in half an inch. See examples throughout this guide.
• Remember, each and every citation in the text of the paper MUST have a full reference displayed in the reference list. The citations in the text provide the reader with a quick glimpse about the sources used, but the references in the reference list provide the reader with all the information needed to seek out the source themselves.

Learn more about each component of the reference citation and how to format it in the sections that follow. See an APA sample paper reference list at the end of this entire section.

Author’s names

The names of authors are written in reverse order. Include the initials for the first and middle names. End this information with a period (see Section 9.8 of the Publication manual ).

Format: Last name, F. M.

• Angelou, M.
• Doyle, A. C.

Two or more authors

When two or more authors work together on a source, write them in the order in which they appear on the source. You can name up to 20 authors in the reference. For sources with 2 to 20 authors, place an ampersand (&) before the final author. Use this format:

Last name, F. M., & Last name, F. M.

Last name, F. M., Last name, F. M., Last name, F. M., Last name, F. M., & Last name, F. M.

Kent, A. G., Giles, R. M., Thorpe, A., Lukes, R., Bever, D. J., & He, Y.

If there are 21 or more authors listed on a source, only include the first 19 authors, add three ellipses, and then add the last author’s name.

Roberts, A., Johnson, M. C., Klein, J., Cheng, E. V., Sherman, A., Levin, K. K. , ...Lopez, G. S.

If you plan on using a free APA citation tool, like the one at CitationMachine.com, the names of the authors will format properly for you.

###No authors

If the source lacks an author, place the title in the first position in the reference (Section 9.12 of the Publication manual ). When the source’s title begins with a number (Such as 101 Dalmatians ), place the reference alphabetically as if the number was spelled out. 101 Dalmatians would be placed in the spot where ‘One hundred’ would go, but keep the numbers in their place.

Additionally, if the title begins with the words ‘A’, ‘An,’ or ‘The,’ ignore these words and place the title alphabetically according to the next word.

See the “Titles” section below for more information on formatting the title of sources.

###Corporate/Organization authors

On an APA reference page, corporate authors are always written out in full. In the text of your paper, you may have some abbreviations (such as UN for United Nations), but in the full references, always include the full names of the corporation or organization (following Section 9.11 of the official Publication manual ).

%%United Nations. (2019). Libya: $202 million needed to bring life-saving aid to half a million people hit by humanitarian crisis. https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/02/1031981

Publication date & retrieval date

Directly after the author’s name is the date the source was published. Include the full date for newspapers and magazine articles, and only the year for journals and all other sources. If no date is found on the source, include the initials, n.d. for “no date.”

%% Narducci, M. (2017, May 19). City renames part of 11th Street Ed Snider Way to honor Flyers founder. The Philadelphia Inquirer . http://www.philly.com/

If using our APA Citation Machine, our citation generator will add the correct format for you automatically.

Giving a retrieval date is not needed unless the online content is likely to be frequently updated and changed (e.g., encyclopedia article, dictionary entry, Twitter profile, etc.).

%%Citation Machine [@CiteMachine]. (n.d.). Tweets [Twitter profile]. Twitter. Retrieved October 10, 2019, from https://twitter.com/CiteMachine

When writing out titles for books, articles, chapters, or other non-periodical sources, only capitalize the first word of the title and the first word of the subtitle. Names of people, places, organizations, and other proper nouns also have the first letter capitalized. For books and reports, italicize the title in the APA citation.

Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Roots: The saga of an American family.

For articles and chapters in APA referencing, do not italicize the title.

Wake up the nation: Public libraries, policy making, and political discourse.

For newspapers, magazines, journals, newsletters, and other periodicals, capitalize the first letter in each word and italicize the title.

The Seattle Times.

A common question is whether to underline your title or place it in italics or quotation marks in the reference list. Here’s a good general rule: When a source sits alone and is not part of a larger whole, place the title in italics. If the source does not sit alone and is part of a larger whole, do not place it in italics.

Books, movies, journals, and television shows are placed in italics since they stand alone. Songs on an album, episodes of television shows, chapters in books, and articles in journals are not placed in italics since they are smaller pieces of larger wholes.

The Citation Machine citation generator will format the title in your citations automatically.

Additional information about the title

If you feel it would be helpful to include additional information about the source type, include a descriptive noun or two in brackets immediately following the title. Capitalize the first letter.

%%Kennedy, K., & Molen, G. R. (Producers), & Spielberg, S. (Director). (1993). Jurassic Park [Film]. USA: Universal.

Besides [Film], other common notations include:

• [Audio podcast]
• [Letter to the editor]
• [Television series episode]
• [Facebook page]
• [Blog post]
• [Lecture notes]
• [PowerPoint presentation]
• [Video file]

If you are using Citation Machine citing tools, additional information about the title is automatically added for you.

Publisher information

For books and reports, include the publisher name but not the location (see Section 9.29 of the Publication manual ). Older editions of the style required the city, state and/or country, but this hasn't been the case since the 7th edition was released.

It is not necessary to include the entire name of the publisher. It is acceptable to use a brief, intelligible form. However, if Books or Press are part of the publisher’s names, keep these words in the reference. Other common terms, such as Inc., Co., Publishers, and others can be omitted.

For newspapers, journals, magazines, and other periodicals, include the volume and issue number after the title. The volume number is listed first, by itself, in italics. The issue number is in parentheses immediately after it, not italicized. There is no space after the closing parenthesis and before the volume number.

%%Giannoukos, G., Besas, G., Hictour, V., & Georgas, T. (2016). A study on the role of computers in adult education. Educational Research and Reviews , 11 (9), 907-923. https://doi.org/10.5897/ERR2016.2688

After including the publisher information, end this section with a period.

Perseus Books.

Electronic source information:

For online sources, the URL or DOI (Direct Object Identifier) are included at the end of an APA citation.

DOI numbers are often created by publishers for journal articles and other periodical sources. They were created in response to the problem of broken or outdated links and URLs. When a journal article is assigned a DOI number, it is static and will never change. Because of its permanent characteristic, DOIs are the preferred type of electronic information to include in APA citations. When a DOI number is not available, include the source’s URL (see Section 9.34 in the Publication manual ).

For DOIs, include the number in this format:

http://doi.org/xxxx

For URLs, type them in this format:

http:// or https://

Other information about electronic sources:

• If the URL is longer than a line, break it up before a punctuation mark.
• Do not place a period at the end of the citation/URL.
• It is unnecessary to include retrieval dates, unless the source changes often over time (like in a Wikipedia article).
• It is not necessary to include the names of databases

If using the Citation Machine APA citation website autocite features, the online publication information will be automatically replaced by the DOI. The Citation Machine APA template will properly cite your online sources for you.

Make sure you run your completed paper through the Citation Machine Plus smart proofreader, which scans for grammar, spelling, and plagiarism. Whether it’s an adjective , verb , or pronoun out-of-place, our technology helps edits your paper for you!

Annotated bibliographies:

An APA annotated bibliography is a full bibliography that includes a small note for each reference citation. Each note should be short (1-2 paragraphs) and contain a summary or your evaluation about each source. When creating your citations on CitationMachine.net, there is a field at the bottom of each form to add your own annotations.

Follow the publication manual guidelines on paper format and writing style. Let your instructor guide other details about your annotations. Still confused? Read our guide on annotated bibliographies .

These types of projects look different depending on the style you’re using. Use the link at the top of the page to access resources related to the Modern Language Association’s style. Here’s information related to Chicago citation style .

Page formatting

Need help with the design and formatting of your paper? Look no further! This section provides the ins and outs of properly displaying the information in your APA essay.

• Times New Roman, 12-point size.
• Calibri, Arial, or Georgia, 11-point size
• Lucida, Sans Unicode, or Computer Modern, 10-point size
• Indents = Every paragraph should start with an indent.
• Margins = 1 inch around the entire document
• Spacing = Double space everything!

Arrange your pages in this order:

• Page 1 - APA Title Page (see below for information on the title page)
• Page 2 - Abstract (If your professor requests one)
• Page 3 - First page of text
• References begin on their own page. Include the list of references on the page after the text.
• Tables and figures

Keep in mind that the order above is the recommendation for papers being submitted for peer review. If you’re writing an APA style paper for a class, your professor may be more lenient about the requirements. Also, if you’re submitting your paper for a specific journal, check the requirements on the journal’s website. Each journal has different rules and procedures.

Just a little nudge to remind you about the Citation Machine Plus smart proofreader. Whether it’s a conjunction or interjection out of place, a misspelled word, or an out of place citation, we’ll offer suggestions for improvement! Don’t forget to check out our APA citation maker while you’re at it!

Running heads

In older editions of APA, running heads were required for all papers. Since the 7th edition, that’s changed.

• Student paper: No running head
• Professional paper: Include a running head

The running head displays the title of the paper and the page number on all pages of the paper. This header is found on every page of a professional paper (not a student paper), even on the title page (sometimes called an APA cover page) and reference list (taken from Section 2.8 of the Publication manual ).

It's displayed all in capital letters at the top of the page. Across from the running head, along the right margin, is the page number.

• Use the header feature in your word processor. Both Google Docs and Word have these features available.
• Use one for the recommended fonts mentioned under "Page formatting."

Title pages

A title page, sometimes called an APA cover page, graces the cover of an essay or paper. An APA title page should follow rules from Section 2.3 of the official Publication manual and include:

• Page number, which is page 1
• Use title case and bold font
• The title should be under 12 words in length
• The title should be a direct explanation of the focus of the paper. Do not include any unnecessary descriptors such as “An Analysis of…” or “A Study of…”
• Exclude any labels such as Mr., Ms., Dr, PhD...
• Name of the school or institution
• Course number and/or class name
• Name of your instructor, including their preferred honorifics (e.g., PhD, Dr., etc.)
• Paper’s due date
• If this is a professional paper, also include a running head. If this is a student paper, do not include one.

Follow the directions for the running head and page number in the section above. Below the running head, a few lines beneath, and centered in the middle of the page, should be the title. The next line below is the author’s name(s), followed by the name of the school or institution, the class or course name, your instructor’s name, and the paper’s due date.

All components on this page should be written in the same font and size as the rest of your paper. Double space the title, names, name of school or institution, and all other information on the page (except for the running head and page number).

Example - Student Title Page APA:

Example - Professional Title Page APA:

If you’re submitting your paper to a journal for publication, check the journal’s website for exact requirements. Each journal is different and some may request a different type of APA format cover page.

Looking to create an APA format title page? Head to CitationMachine.com’s homepage and choose “Title Page” at the top of the screen.

An abstract briefly but thoroughly summarizes dissertation contents. It’s found in the beginning of a professional paper, right after the title page. Abstracts are meant to help readers determine whether to continue reading the entire document. With that in mind, try to craft the lead sentence to entice the reader to continue reading.

Here are a few tips:

• Be factual and keep your opinions out. An abstract should accurately reflect the paper or dissertation and should not involve information or commentary not in the thesis.
• Communicate your main thesis. What was the examined problem or hypothesis? A reader should know this from reading your abstract.
• Keep it brief. Stick to the main points and don’t add unnecessary words or facts. It should not exceed 250 words.
• Consider your paper’s purpose. It’s important to cater your abstract to your paper type and think about what information the target audience for that paper type would want. For example, an empirical article may mention methodology or participant description. A quantitative or qualitative meta-analysis would mention the different variables considered and how information was synthesized.
• Use verbs over noun equivalents, and active voice. Example: “There was research into…” becomes “We researched…”

Formatting guidelines:

• The abstract goes after the title page.
• It should have the same font (size and type) as the rest of the paper.
• It should stick to one page.
• Double-space all page text.
• Center and bold the word “Abstract” at the top of the paper.
• Don’t indent the first line of the abstract body. The body should also be in plain text.
• For the keywords, place it on the line after the abstract and indent the first line (but not subsequent lines). The word “Keywords:” is capitalized, italicized, and followed by a colon. The actual keywords are sentence case and in plan font.
• List each keyword one after the other, and separate them by a comma.
• After the last keyword, no ending punctuation is needed.

Tables & Figures

If your paper includes a lot of numerical information or data, you may want to consider placing it into a table or a figure, rather than typing it all out. A visual figure or simple, organized table filled with numerical data is often easier for readers to digest and comprehend than tons of paragraphs filled with numbers. Chapter 7 of the Publication manual outlines formatting for tables and figures. Let's cover the basics below.

If you’d like to include a table or figure in your paper, here are a few key pieces of information to keep in mind:

• At the end of the paper after the APA reference page
• In the text after it is first mentioned
• The table first mentioned in the text should be titled ‘Table 1.’ The next table mentioned in the text is ‘Table 2,’ and so on. For figures, it would be 'Figure 1,' 'Figure 2,' and so forth.

• Even though every table and figure is numbered, also create a title for each that describes the information it contains. Capitalize all important words in the title.
• For tables, do not use any vertical lines, only use horizontal to break up information and headings.
• Single spacing is acceptable to use in tables and figures. If you prefer double spacing your information, that is okay too.
• Do not include extra information or “fluff.” Keep it simple!
• Do not include the same exact information in the paper. Only include the complete information in one area—the table or the text.
• All tables and figures must be referenced in the text. It is unacceptable to throw a table or figure into the back of the paper without first providing a brief summary or explanation of its relevance.

Publication Manual 6th Edition vs 7th Edition

The 6th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association was released in 2009. The current 7th edition came out in the fall of 2019 and was designed to be more student focused, provide more guidance on accessibility, and address changes that have developed over the last 10 years.

Below, we’ve listed what we feel are the most relevant changes related to APA format.

Journals and DOIs

DOI stands for “digital object identifier.” Many journal articles use and have a unique DOI that should be included in a full citation.

When including a DOI in a citation, format it as a URL. Do not label it “DOI.” Articles without DOIs from databases are treated as print works. For example:

6th edition:

%%Gänsicke, B. T., Schreiber, M. R., Toloza, O., Fusillo, N. P. G., Koester, D., & Manser, C. J. (2019). Accretion of a giant planet onto a white dwarf star. Nature, 576 (7785), 61–64. doi: 10.1038/s41586-019-1789-8

7th edition:

%%Gänsicke, B. T., Schreiber, M. R., Toloza, O., Fusillo, N. P. G., Koester, D., & Manser, C. J. (2019). Accretion of a giant planet onto a white dwarf star. Nature, 576 (7785), 61–64. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1789-8

Citing Books

There are few new guidelines when you are citing a book. First, the publisher location no longer needs to be indicated.

%%Zack, P. O. (2001). The shoals of time. Bloomington, IN: First Books Library.

%%Zack, P. O. (2001). The shoals of time. First Books Library.

Second, the format of an ebook (e.g., Kindle, etc.) no longer needs to be indicated.

%%Niven, J. (2012). Ada Blackjack: A true story of survival in the Arctic [Kindle].

%%Niven, J. (2012). Ada Blackjack: A true story of survival in the Arctic .

Lastly, books from research databases without DOIs are treated the same as print works.

When using a URL in a citation, you no longer need to include the term “Retrieved from” before URLs (except with retrieval dates). The font should be blue and underlined, or black and not underlined.

6th Edition:

%%Flood, A. (2019, December 6). Britain has closed almost 800 libraries since 2010, figures show. The Guardian . Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/06/britain-has-closed-almost-800-libraries-since-2010-figures-show

7th Edition:

%%Flood, A. (2019, December 6). Britain has closed almost 800 libraries since 2010, figures show. The Guardian . https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/06/britain-has-closed-almost-800-libraries-since-2010-figures-show

Within a full APA citation, you may spell out up to 20 author names. For two to 20 authors, include an ampersand (&) before the name of the last author. For sources with 21 or more authors, structure it as follows:

Structure: First 19 authors’ names, . . . Last author’s name.

7th edition example: Washington, G., Adams, J., Jefferson, T., Madison, J., Monroe, J., Adams, J. Q., Jackson, A., Van Buren, M., Harrison, W. H., Tyler, J., Polk, J. K., Taylor, Z., Filmore, M., Pierce, F., Buchanan, J., Lincoln, A., Johnson, A., Grant, U. S., Hayes, R. B., Garfield, . . . Trump, D.

When creating an in-text citation for a source with 3 or more authors, use “et al.” after the first author’s name. This helps abbreviate the mention.

6th Edition: (Honda, Johnson, Prosser, Rossi, 2019)

7th Edition: (Honda et al., 2019)

Tables and Figures

Instead of having different formats for tables and figures, both use one standardized format. Now both tables and figures have a number, a title, name of the table/figure, and a note at the bottom.

If you’re still typing into Google “how to cite a website APA” among other related questions and keywords, click here for further reading on the style .

When you’re through with your writing, toss your entire paper into the Citation Machine Plus plagiarism checker , which will scan your paper for grammar edits and give you up to 5 suggestions cards for free! Worry less about a determiner , preposition , or adverb out of place and focus on your research!

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) (2020). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

Updated March 3, 2020

Written and edited by Michele Kirschenbaum and Wendy Ikemoto. Michele Kirschenbaum has been an awesome school librarian since 2006 and is an expert in citing sources. Wendy Ikemoto has a master’s degree in library and information science and has been working for Citation Machine since 2012.

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Free APA Citation Generator

Generate citations in APA format quickly and automatically, with MyBib!

🤔 What is an APA Citation Generator?

An APA citation generator is a software tool that will automatically format academic citations in the American Psychological Association (APA) style.

It will usually request vital details about a source -- like the authors, title, and publish date -- and will output these details with the correct punctuation and layout required by the official APA style guide.

Formatted citations created by a generator can be copied into the bibliography of an academic paper as a way to give credit to the sources referenced in the main body of the paper.

👩‍🎓 Who uses an APA Citation Generator?

College-level and post-graduate students are most likely to use an APA citation generator, because APA style is the most favored style at these learning levels. Before college, in middle and high school, MLA style is more likely to be used. In other parts of the world styles such as Harvard (UK and Australia) and DIN 1505 (Europe) are used more often.

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Like almost every other citation style, APA style can be cryptic and hard to understand when formatting citations. Citations can take an unreasonable amount of time to format manually, and it is easy to accidentally include errors. By using a citation generator to do this work you will:

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In academia, bibliographies are graded on their accuracy against the official APA rulebook, so it is important for students to ensure their citations are formatted correctly. Special attention should also be given to ensure the entire document (including main body) is structured according to the APA guidelines. Our complete APA format guide has everything you need know to make sure you get it right (including examples and diagrams).

⚙️ How do I use MyBib's APA Citation Generator?

Our APA generator was built with a focus on simplicity and speed. To generate a formatted reference list or bibliography just follow these steps:

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• Repeat for each citation, then download the formatted list and append it to the end of your paper.

MyBib supports the following for APA style:

Daniel is a qualified librarian, former teacher, and citation expert. He has been contributing to MyBib since 2018.

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• APA Style 7th edition
• APA headings and subheadings

APA Headings and Subheadings | With Sample Paper

Published on November 7, 2020 by Raimo Streefkerk . Revised on October 24, 2022.

Headings and subheadings provide structure to a document. They signal what each section is about and allow for easy navigation of the document.

APA headings have five possible levels. Each heading level is formatted differently.

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Table of contents

Additional guidelines for apa headings, how many heading levels should you use, when to use which apa heading level, section labels vs headings, sample paper with apa headings, using heading styles in word or google docs.

As well as the heading styles, there are some other guidelines to keep in mind:

• Double-space all text, including the headings.
• Use the same font for headings and body text (e.g., Times New Roman 12pt.).
• Don’t label headings with numbers or letters.
• Don’t add extra “enters” above or below headings.

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Depending on the length and complexity of your paper, you may not use all five heading levels. In fact, shorter student papers may have no headings at all.

It’s also perfectly fine for some sections in your paper to go as deep as five levels, where others use only heading level 1.

Heading level 1 is used for main sections like “ Methods ”, “ Results ”, and “ Discussion ”. There is no “ Introduction ” heading at the beginning of your paper because the first paragraphs are understood to be introductory.

Heading level 2 is used for subsections under level 1. For example, under “Methods” (level 1) you may have subsections for “Sampling Method” and “Data Analysis” (level 2). This continues all the way down to heading level 5.

Always use at least two subheadings or none at all. If there is just one subheading, the top-level heading is sufficient.

In addition to regular headings, APA works with “section labels” for specific parts of the paper. They’re similar to headings but are formatted differently. Section labels are placed on a separate line at the top of a new page in bold and centered.

Use section labels for the following sections in an APA formatted paper :

• Author note
• Paper title
• Reference page

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Instead of formatting every heading individually, you can use the “Styles” feature in Word or Google Docs. This allows you to save the styling and apply it with just a click.

The first time you use APA Style, you need to update the default heading styles to reflect the APA heading guidelines. Click here for the instructions for Microsoft Word and Google Docs .

An added benefit of using the “Styles” feature is that you can automatically generate a table of contents .

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Student trust in the teacher: A critical but overlooked factor in student success

Building student trust improves engagement and outcomes.

• Schools and Classrooms

Last year, one of my advisees was taking a required general education course that has a notorious reputation for being dull and pointless, yet easy to pass. (It was not General Psychology.) As a result, many students skipped classes and turned in assignments late. To try to address the problem, the department instituted strict course policies. If students missed more than two classes for any reason, they would be docked a letter grade for each absence, and no late assignments would be accepted. My advisee had already missed a class due to illness. Then one morning she woke up with a sore throat. Not wanting to take any chances, she went to the health clinic to be tested for COVID-19 instead of going to class. It took a long time, and by the time she got done, she had missed the deadline for an assignment by 10 minutes. She wrote a note to the instructor explaining her situation. The instructor praised her for doing the right thing but warned her, per class policy, that another absence would lower her grade and told her she would get a zero for the assignment. The instructor was simply following course policies listed on the syllabus, but the impact on my advisee’s interest and motivation in the class was devastating. She was tempted to drop the course, but she would just have to take it again, so she stayed in.

The policies, though within the purview of the instructor and applied uniformly, undermined student effort and learning. The most obvious issue with these policies is that they pitted doing the right thing for the health of the students against doing well in the course. There is, however, a deeper issue. The policies undermined student trust in the teacher. They assumed a negative view of students, that they are unmotivated, eager to skip classes, and seek easy ways to pass. Second, the policies also prioritized compliance without regard to the life stresses experienced by students. The policies were both demeaning to students and dismissive of the demands in their personal lives.

I’ve recently been exploring student trust in the teacher and its role in student motivation and perseverance. We know that trust is vital in social relationships and organizations, but there is remarkably little research on the role of trust in educational settings. Trust is interpersonal, and it involves a subjective judgment about the motives of others that may or may not be accurate. In teaching, students make judgments about the motives of their teacher. Furthermore, trust is most important when people feel most vulnerable and at risk of failure. Students seek trust in teachers when taking courses that are both challenging and required for their major or that cover a topic in which students feel anxious and insecure. Minoritized students who feel outside the mainstream culture of the campus will be especially sensitive to the trustworthiness of their teachers.

In my research, I define student trust in the teacher as a student’s willingness to risk vulnerability and pursue challenging work due to the belief that a teacher is competent, will demonstrate integrity, and will act in ways that are beneficial to the student’s learning and development. This definition has three components. The student must perceive the teacher as having:

• Competence: The teacher has both the disciplinary knowledge and teaching skill to teach a successful class
• Integrity: The teacher is truthful and conscientious, and treats students respectfully
• Beneficence: The teacher will work to promote and enhance the learning and development of students in the class

The policies that my advisee encountered violate both integrity and beneficence. They do not regard students as people with meaningful stresses and constraints in their lives, and they are not designed to promote optimal student learning. Violation of integrity and beneficence probably leads to a low judgment of teacher competence. The policies seem to use grading authority to compensate for problems with the course design and delivery, rather than trying to improve teaching.

My students and I have conducted both experimental and correlational research showing that students are more willing to work hard and take on more challenging work when trust in the teacher is high (Chew et al., 2020). They are more likely to “buy in” to active learning strategies that are more effortful than passive learning. Violations of any of the three components, especially integrity and beneficence, can lead to a damaging overall loss of trust and perceived teacher competence. 

Trust in the teacher is often confused with student-teacher rapport, but my research shows that these concepts are distinct.  Rapport refers to a personal connection between students and teacher (Benson, Cohen, & Buskist, 2005). Teachers who create good rapport with students are seen to be approachable, accessible, encouraging, respectful, and caring of students. Clearly, there is some overlap in terms of being respectful and caring, but trust involves competence and beneficence, which are not part of rapport. Students may see a teacher as friendly and approachable but may not trust them. On the other hand, students may find a professor aloof and intimidating, but still perceive them as reliable and helpful in their learning. Both rapport and trust increase student effort and motivation, but trust is the more potent variable. When it comes down to it, it is more important for students to trust us than to like us.

If student trust is so important, how can faculty encourage it in their students? We’ve looked into factors that both augment and undermine student trust, but the work is ongoing. Here are some things to do if you want to build student trust:

• Acknowledge any particular student anxieties.
• Be transparent in your course goals and methods; explain the value of the course and the methods you are using to achieve course goals.
• Promote belongingness and community within your courses.
• Establish norms of dignity and respect.
• Give students multiple opportunities and means to demonstrate their learning.
• Provide frequent formative feedback.
• Show flexibility in assignments and deadlines to let students do their best work.
• Admit when you are in error.

Here are some things to avoid if you don’t want to undermine student trust:

• Show indifference or irritation at student concerns and questions.
• Be inconsistent or arbitrary in administering policies.
• Play favorites in class.
• Humiliate or embarrass students.
• Make insensitive or prejudicial remarks.
• Base actions on personal convenience rather than what is best for student learning.

Benson, T. A., Cohen, A. L., & Buskist, W. (2005). Rapport: Its Relation to Student Attitudes and Behaviors Toward Teachers and Classes.  Teaching of Psychology, 32 (4), 237–239.  https://doi.org/10.1207/s15328023top3204_8

Chew S. L., Berry, J. W., & Fineburg, A. (August, 2020 ). Student trust in the teacher: Its measurement and impact on academic success [Conference Session] . American Psychological Association.

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LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES v. RAIMONDO

• Supreme Court

LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES v. RAIMONDO No. 22–451, 45 F. 4th 359 & No. 22–1219, 62 F. 4th 621, vacated and remanded.

• Syllabus [Syllabus] [PDF]
• Opinion , Roberts [Roberts Opinion] [PDF]
• Concurrence , Thomas [Thomas Concurrence] [PDF]
• Concurrence , Gorsuch [Gorsuch Concurrence] [PDF]
• Dissent , Kagan [Kagan Dissent] [PDF]

NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued. The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader. See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 U. S. 321 , 337.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES et al. v . RAIMONDO, SECRETARY OF COMMERCE, et al.

certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the district of columbia circuit

The Court granted certiorari in these cases limited to the question whether Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. , 467 U. S. 837 , should be overruled or clarified. Under the Chevron doctrine, courts have sometimes been required to defer to “permissible” agency interpretations of the statutes those agencies administer—even when a reviewing court reads the statute differently. Id. , at 843. In each case below, the reviewing courts applied Chevron ’s framework to resolve in favor of the Government challenges by petitioners to a rule promulgated by the National Marine Fisheries Service pursuant to the Magnuson-Stevens Act, 16 U. S. C. §1801 et seq. , which incorporates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U. S. C. §551 et seq .

Held : The Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous; Chevron is overruled. Pp. 7–35.

  (a) Article III of the Constitution assigns to the Federal Judiciary the responsibility and power to adjudicate “Cases” and “Controversies”—concrete disputes with consequences for the parties involved. The Framers appreciated that the laws judges would necessarily apply in resolving those disputes would not always be clear, but envisioned  that the final “interpretation of the laws” would be “the proper and peculiar province of the courts.” The Federalist No. 78, p. 525 (A. Hamilton). As Chief Justice Marshall declared in the foundational decision of Marbury v. Madison , “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” 1 Cranch 137, 177. In the decades following Marbury , when the meaning of a statute was at issue, the judicial role was to “interpret the act of Congress, in order to ascertain the rights of the parties.” Decatur v. Paulding , 14 Pet. 497, 515.

  The Court recognized from the outset, though, that exercising independent judgment often included according due respect to Executive Branch interpretations of federal statutes. Such respect was thought especially warranted when an Executive Branch interpretation was issued roughly contemporaneously with enactment of the statute and remained consistent over time. The Court also gave “the most respectful consideration” to Executive Branch interpretations simply because “[t]he officers concerned [were] usually able men, and masters of the subject,” who may well have drafted the laws at issue. United States v. Moore , 95 U. S. 760 , 763. “Respect,” though, was just that. The views of the Executive Branch could inform the judgment of the Judiciary, but did not supersede it. “[I]n cases where [a court’s] own judgment . . . differ[ed] from that of other high functionaries,” the court was “not at liberty to surrender, or to waive it.” United States v. Dickson , 15 Pet. 141, 162 .

  During the “rapid expansion of the administrative process” that took place during the New Deal era, United States v. Morton Salt Co. , 338 U. S. 632 , 644, the Court often treated agency determinations of fact as binding on the courts, provided that there was “evidence to support the findings,” St. Joseph Stock Yards Co. v. United States , 298 U. S. 38 , 51. But the Court did not extend similar deference to agency resolutions of questions of law . “The interpretation of the meaning of statutes, as applied to justiciable controversies,” remained “exclusively a judicial function.” United States v. American Trucking Assns., Inc. , 310 U. S. 534 , 544. The Court also continued to note that the informed judgment of the Executive Branch could be entitled to “great weight.” Id. , at 549. “The weight of such a judgment in a particular case,” the Court observed, would “depend upon the thoroughness evident in its consideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency with earlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors which give it power to persuade, if lacking power to control.” Skidmore v. Swift & Co. , 323 U. S. 134 , 140.

  Occasionally during this period, the Court applied deferential review after concluding that a particular statute empowered an agency to decide how a broad statutory term applied to specific facts found by  the agency. See Gray v. Powell , 314 U. S. 402 ; NLRB v. Hearst Publications, Inc. , 322 U. S. 111 . But such deferential review, which the Court was far from consistent in applying, was cabined to factbound determinations. And the Court did not purport to refashion the longstanding judicial approach to questions of law. It instead proclaimed that “[u]ndoubtedly questions of statutory interpretation . . . are for the courts to resolve, giving appropriate weight to the judgment of those whose special duty is to administer the questioned statute.” Id. , at 130–131. Nothing in the New Deal era or before it thus resembled the deference rule the Court would begin applying decades later to all varieties of agency interpretations of statutes under Chevron . Pp. 7–13.

  (b) Congress in 1946 enacted the APA “as a check upon administrators whose zeal might otherwise have carried them to excesses not contemplated in legislation creating their offices.” Morton Salt , 338 U. S., at 644. The APA prescribes procedures for agency action and delineates the basic contours of judicial review of such action. And it codifies for agency cases the unremarkable, yet elemental proposition reflected by judicial practice dating back to Marbury : that courts decide legal questions by applying their own judgment. As relevant here, the APA specifies that courts, not agencies, will decide “ all relevant questions of law” arising on review of agency action, 5 U. S. C. §706 (emphasis added)—even those involving ambiguous laws. It prescribes no deferential standard for courts to employ in answering those legal questions, despite mandating deferential judicial review of agency policymaking and factfinding. See §§706(2)(A), (E). And by directing courts to “interpret constitutional and statutory provisions” without differentiating between the two, §706, it makes clear that agency interpretations of statutes—like agency interpretations of the Constitution—are not entitled to deference. The APA’s history and the contemporaneous views of various respected commentators underscore the plain meaning of its text.

  Courts exercising independent judgment in determining the meaning of statutory provisions, consistent with the APA, may—as they have from the start—seek aid from the interpretations of those responsible for implementing particular statutes. See Skidmore , 323 U. S., at 140. And when the best reading of a statute is that it delegates discretionary authority to an agency, the role of the reviewing court under the APA is, as always, to independently interpret the statute and effectuate the will of Congress subject to constitutional limits. The court fulfills that role by recognizing constitutional delegations, fixing the boundaries of the delegated authority, and ensuring the agency has engaged in “ ‘reasoned decisionmaking’ ” within those boundaries. Michigan v. EPA , 576 U. S. 743 , 750 (quoting Allentown Mack Sales & Service, Inc. v. NLRB , 522 U. S. 359 , 374). By doing so, a court upholds the traditional conception of the judicial function that the APA adopts. Pp. 13–18.

  (c) The deference that Chevron requires of courts reviewing agency action cannot be squared with the APA. Pp. 18–29.

   (1)  Chevron , decided in 1984 by a bare quorum of six Justices, triggered a marked departure from the traditional judicial approach of independently examining each statute to determine its meaning. The question in the case was whether an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation was consistent with the term “stationary source” as used in the Clean Air Act. 467 U. S., at 840. To answer that question, the Court articulated and employed a now familiar two-step approach broadly applicable to review of agency action. The first step was to discern “whether Congress ha[d] directly spoken to the precise question at issue.” Id. , at 842. The Court explained that “[i]f the intent of Congress is clear, that is the end of the matter,” ibid. , and courts were therefore to “reject administrative constructions which are contrary to clear congressional intent,” id. , at 843, n. 9. But in a case in which “the statute [was] silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue” at hand, a reviewing court could not “simply impose its own construction on the statute, as would be necessary in the absence of an administrative interpretation.” Id. , at 843 (footnote omitted) . Instead, at Chevron ’s second step, a court had to defer to the agency if it had offered “a permissible construction of the statute,” ibid. , even if not “the reading the court would have reached if the question initially had arisen in a judicial proceeding,” ibid. , n. 11. Employing this new test, the Court concluded that Congress had not addressed the question at issue with the necessary “level of specificity” and that EPA’s interpretation was “entitled to deference.” Id. , at 865.

  Although the Court did not at first treat Chevron as the watershed decision it was fated to become, the Court and the courts of appeals were soon routinely invoking its framework as the governing standard in cases involving statutory questions of agency authority. The Court eventually decided that Chevron rested on “a presumption that Congress, when it left ambiguity in a statute meant for implementation by an agency, understood that the ambiguity would be resolved, first and foremost, by the agency, and desired the agency (rather than the courts) to possess whatever degree of discretion the ambiguity allows.” Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota), N. A. , 517 U. S. 735 , 740–741. Pp. 18–20.

   (2) Neither Chevron nor any subsequent decision of the Court attempted to reconcile its framework with the APA. Chevron defies the command of the APA that “the reviewing court”—not the agency whose  action it reviews—is to “decide all relevant questions of law” and “interpret . . . statutory provisions.” §706 (emphasis added). It requires a court to ignore , not follow, “the reading the court would have reached” had it exercised its independent judgment as required by the APA. Chevron , 467 U. S., at 843, n. 11. Chevron insists on more than the “respect” historically given to Executive Branch interpretations; it demands that courts mechanically afford binding deference to agency interpretations, including those that have been inconsistent over time, see id. , at 863, and even when a pre-existing judicial precedent holds that an ambiguous statute means something else, National Cable & Telecommunications Assn. v. Brand X Internet Services , 545 U. S. 967 , 982. That regime is the antithesis of the time honored approach the APA prescribes.

   Chevron cannot be reconciled with the APA by presuming that statutory ambiguities are implicit delegations to agencies. That presumption does not approximate reality. A statutory ambiguity does not necessarily reflect a congressional intent that an agency, as opposed to a court, resolve the resulting interpretive question. Many or perhaps most statutory ambiguities may be unintentional. And when courts confront statutory ambiguities in cases that do not involve agency interpretations or delegations of authority, they are not somehow relieved of their obligation to independently interpret the statutes. Instead of declaring a particular party’s reading “permissible” in such a case, courts use every tool at their disposal to determine the best reading of the statute and resolve the ambiguity. But in an agency case as in any other, there is a best reading all the same—“the reading the court would have reached” if no agency were involved. Chevron , 467 U. S., at 843, n. 11. It therefore makes no sense to speak of a “permissible” interpretation that is not the one the court, after applying all relevant interpretive tools, concludes is best.

  Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron ’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do. The Framers anticipated that courts would often confront statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve them by exercising independent legal judgment. Chevron gravely erred in concluding that the inquiry is fundamentally different just because an administrative interpretation is in play. The very point of the traditional tools of statutory construction is to resolve statutory ambiguities. That is no less true when the ambiguity is about the scope of an agency’s own power—perhaps the occasion on which abdication in favor of the agency is least appropriate. Pp. 21–23.

   (3) The Government responds that Congress must generally intend for agencies to resolve statutory ambiguities because agencies have subject matter expertise regarding the statutes they administer;  because deferring to agencies purportedly promotes the uniform construction of federal law; and because resolving statutory ambiguities can involve policymaking best left to political actors, rather than courts. See Brief for Respondents in No. 22–1219, pp. 16–19. But none of these considerations justifies Chevron ’s sweeping presumption of congressional intent.

  As the Court recently noted, interpretive issues arising in connection with a regulatory scheme “may fall more naturally into a judge’s bailiwick” than an agency’s. Kisor v. Wilkie , 588 U. S. 558 , 578. Under Chevron ’s broad rule of deference, though, ambiguities of all stripes trigger deference, even in cases having little to do with an agency’s technical subject matter expertise. And even when an ambiguity happens to implicate a technical matter, it does not follow that Congress has taken the power to authoritatively interpret the statute from the courts and given it to the agency. Congress expects courts to handle technical statutory questions, and courts did so without issue in agency cases before Chevron . After all, in an agency case in particular, the reviewing court will go about its task with the agency’s “body of experience and informed judgment,” among other information, at its disposal. Skidmore , 323 U. S., at 140. An agency’s interpretation of a statute “cannot bind a court,” but may be especially informative “to the extent it rests on factual premises within [the agency’s] expertise.” Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms v. FLRA , 464 U. S. 89 , 98, n. 8. Delegating ultimate interpretive authority to agencies is simply not necessary to ensure that the resolution of statutory ambiguities is well informed by subject matter expertise.

  Nor does a desire for the uniform construction of federal law justify Chevron . It is unclear how much the Chevron doctrine as a whole actually promotes such uniformity, and in any event, we see no reason to presume that Congress prefers uniformity for uniformity’s sake over the correct interpretation of the laws it enacts.

  Finally, the view that interpretation of ambiguous statutory provisions amounts to policymaking suited for political actors rather than courts is especially mistaken because it rests on a profound misconception of the judicial role. Resolution of statutory ambiguities involves legal interpretation, and that task does not suddenly become policymaking just because a court has an “agency to fall back on.” Kisor , 588 U. S., at 575. Courts interpret statutes, no matter the context, based on the traditional tools of statutory construction, not individual policy preferences. To stay out of discretionary policymaking left to the political branches, judges need only fulfill their obligations under the APA to independently identify and respect such delegations of authority, police the outer statutory boundaries of those delegations, and ensure that agencies exercise their discretion consistent with the APA.  By forcing courts to instead pretend that ambiguities are necessarily delegations, Chevron prevents judges from judging. Pp. 23–26.

   (4) Because Chevron ’s justifying presumption is, as Members of the Court have often recognized, a fiction, the Court has spent the better part of four decades imposing one limitation on Chevron after another. Confronted with the byzantine set of preconditions and exceptions that has resulted, some courts have simply bypassed Chevron or failed to heed its various steps and nuances. The Court, for its part, has not deferred to an agency interpretation under Chevron since 2016. But because Chevron remains on the books, litigants must continue to wrestle with it, and lower courts—bound by even the Court’s crumbling precedents—understandably continue to apply it. At best, Chevron has been a distraction from the question that matters: Does the statute authorize the challenged agency action? And at worst, it has required courts to violate the APA by yielding to an agency the express responsibility, vested in “the reviewing court ,” to “decide all relevant questions of law” and “interpret . . . statutory provisions.” §706 (emphasis added). Pp. 26–29.

  (d)  Stare decisis , the doctrine governing judicial adherence to precedent, does not require the Court to persist in the Chevron project. The stare decisis considerations most relevant here—“the quality of [the precedent’s] reasoning, the workability of the rule it established, . . . and reliance on the decision,” Knick v. Township of Scott , 588 U. S. 180 , 203 (quoting Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees , 585 U. S. 878 , 917)—all weigh in favor of letting Chevron go.

   Chevron has proved to be fundamentally misguided. It reshaped judicial review of agency action without grappling with the APA, the statute that lays out how such review works. And its flaws were apparent from the start, prompting the Court to revise its foundations and continually limit its application.

  Experience has also shown that Chevron is unworkable. The defining feature of its framework is the identification of statutory ambiguity, but the concept of ambiguity has always evaded meaningful definition. Such an impressionistic and malleable concept “cannot stand as an every-day test for allocating” interpretive authority between courts and agencies. Swift & Co. v. Wickham , 382 U. S. 111 , 125. The Court has also been forced to clarify the doctrine again and again, only adding to Chevron ’s unworkability, and the doctrine continues to spawn difficult threshold questions that promise to further complicate the inquiry should Chevron be retained. And its continuing import is far from clear, as courts have often declined to engage with the doctrine, saying it makes no difference.

  Nor has Chevron fostered meaningful reliance. Given the Court’s constant tinkering with and eventual turn away from Chevron , it is  hard to see how anyone could reasonably expect a court to rely on Chevron in any particular case or expect it to produce readily foreseeable outcomes. And rather than safeguarding reliance interests, Chevron affirmatively destroys them by allowing agencies to change course even when Congress has given them no power to do so.

  The only way to “ensure that the law will not merely change erratically, but will develop in a principled and intelligible fashion,” Vasquez v. Hillery , 474 U. S. 254 , 265, is for the Court to leave Chevron behind. By overruling Chevron , though, the Court does not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework. The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions are lawful—including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself—are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite the Court’s change in interpretive methodology. See CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries , 553 U. S. 442 , 457. Mere reliance on Chevron cannot constitute a “ ‘special justification’ ” for overruling such a holding. Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc. , 573 U. S. 258 , 266 (quoting Dickerson v. United States , 530 U. S. 428 , 443). Pp. 29–35.

No. 22–451, 45 F. 4th 359 & No. 22–1219, 62 F. 4th 621, vacated and remanded.

  Roberts , C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Thomas , Alito , Gorsuch , Kavanaugh , and Barrett , JJ., joined. Thomas , J., and Gorsuch , J., filed concurring opinions. Kagan , J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Sotomayor , J., joined, and in which Jackson , J., joined as it applies to No. 22–1219. Jackson , J., took no part in the consideration or decision of the case in No. 22–451.

1 *Together with No. 22–1219, Relentless , Inc. , et al. v. Department of Commerce , et al. , on certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

NOTICE: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the United States Reports. Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of Decisions, Supreme Court of the United States, Washington, D. C. 20543, [email protected], of any typographical or other formal errors.

_________________

Nos. 22–451 and 22–1219

LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES, et al. , PETITIONERS

GINA RAIMONDO, SECRETARY OF COMMERCE, et al .

on writ of certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the district of columbia circuit

RELENTLESS, INC., et al ., PETITIONERS

22–1219  v.

DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, et al .

on writ of certiorari to the united states court of appeals for the first circuit

 Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of the Court.

 Since our decision in Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. , 467 U. S. 837 (1984) , we have sometimes required courts to defer to “permissible” agency interpretations of the statutes those agencies administer—even when a reviewing court reads the statute differently. In these cases we consider whether that doctrine should be overruled.

 Our Chevron doctrine requires courts to use a two-step  framework to interpret statutes administered by federal agencies. After determining that a case satisfies the various preconditions we have set for Chevron to apply, a reviewing court must first assess “whether Congress has directly spoken to the precise question at issue.” Id. , at 842. If, and only if, congressional intent is “clear,” that is the end of the inquiry. Ibid. But if the court determines that “the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue” at hand, the court must, at Chevron ’s second step, defer to the agency’s interpretation if it “is based on a permissible construction of the statute.” Id. , at 843. The reviewing courts in each of the cases before us applied Chevron ’s framework to resolve in favor of the Government challenges to the same agency rule.

 Before 1976, unregulated foreign vessels dominated fishing in the international waters off the U. S. coast, which began just 12 nautical miles offshore. See, e.g. , S. Rep.  No. 94–459, pp. 2–3 (1975). Recognizing the resultant overfishing and the need for sound management of fishery resources, Congress enacted the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA). See 90 Stat. 331 (codified as amended at 16 U. S. C. §1801 et seq .). The MSA and subsequent amendments extended the jurisdiction of the United States to 200 nautical miles beyond the U. S. territorial sea and claimed “exclusive fishery management authority over all fish” within that area, known as the “exclusive economic zone.” §1811(a); see Presidential Proclamation No. 5030, 3 CFR 22 (1983 Comp.); §§101, 102, 90 Stat. 336 . The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) administers the MSA under a delegation from the Secretary of Commerce.

 The MSA established eight regional fishery management councils composed of representatives from the coastal States, fishery stakeholders, and NMFS. See 16 U. S. C.  §§1852(a), (b). The councils develop fishery management plans, which NMFS approves and promulgates as final regulations. See §§1852(h), 1854(a). In service of the statute’s fishery conservation and management goals, see §1851(a), the MSA requires that certain provisions—such as “a mechanism for specifying annual catch limits . . . at a level such that overfishing does not occur,” §1853(a)(15)—be included in these plans, see §1853(a). The plans may also include additional discretionary provisions. See §1853(b). For example, plans may “prohibit, limit, condition, or require the use of specified types and quantities of fishing gear, fishing vessels, or equipment,” §1853(b)(4); “reserve a portion of the allowable biological catch of the fishery for use in scientific research,” §1853(b)(11); and “prescribe such other measures, requirements, or conditions and restrictions as are determined to be necessary and appropriate for the conservation and management of the fishery,” §1853(b)(14).

 Relevant here, a plan may also require that “one or more observers be carried on board” domestic vessels “for the purpose of collecting data necessary for the conservation and management of the fishery.” §1853(b)(8). The MSA specifies three groups that must cover costs associated with observers: (1) foreign fishing vessels operating within the exclusive economic zone (which must carry observers), see §§1821(h)(1)(A), (h)(4), (h)(6); (2) vessels participating in certain limited access privilege programs, which impose quotas permitting fishermen to harvest only specific quantities of a fishery’s total allowable catch, see §§1802(26), 1853a(c)(1)(H), (e)(2), 1854(d)(2); and (3) vessels within the jurisdiction of the North Pacific Council, where many of the largest and most successful commercial fishing enterprises in the Nation operate, see §1862(a). In the latter two cases, the MSA expressly caps the relevant fees at two or three percent of the value of fish harvested on the vessels. See §§1854(d)(2)(B), 1862(b)(2)(E). And in general, it author izes the Secretary to impose “sanctions” when “any payment required for observer services provided to or contracted by an owner or operator . . . has not been paid.” §1858(g)(1)(D).

 The MSA does not contain similar terms addressing whether Atlantic herring fishermen may be required to bear costs associated with any observers a plan may mandate. And at one point, NMFS fully funded the observer coverage the New England Fishery Management Council required in its plan for the Atlantic herring fishery. See 79 Fed. Reg. 8792 (2014). In 2013, however, the council proposed amending its fishery management plans to empower it to require fishermen to pay for observers if federal funding became unavailable. Several years later, NMFS promulgated a rule approving the amendment. See 85 Fed. Reg. 7414 (2020).

 With respect to the Atlantic herring fishery, the Rule created an industry funded program that aims to ensure observer coverage on 50 percent of trips undertaken by vessels with certain types of permits. Under that program, vessel representatives must “declare into” a fishery before beginning a trip by notifying NMFS of the trip and announcing the species the vessel intends to harvest. If NMFS determines that an observer is required, but declines to assign a Government-paid one, the vessel must contract with and pay for a Government-certified third-party observer. NMFS estimated that the cost of such an observer would be up to $710 per day, reducing annual returns to the vessel owner by up to 20 percent. See id. , at 7417–7418.

 Petitioners Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc., H&L Axelsson, Inc., Lund Marr Trawlers LLC, and Scombrus One LLC are family businesses that operate in the Atlantic herring fishery. In February 2020, they challenged the Rule under the MSA, 16 U. S. C. §1855 (f ), which incorporates  the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U. S. C. §551 et seq. In relevant part, they argued that the MSA does not authorize NMFS to mandate that they pay for observers required by a fishery management plan. The District Court granted summary judgment to the Government. It concluded that the MSA authorized the Rule, but noted that even if these petitioners’ “arguments were enough to raise an ambiguity in the statutory text,” deference to the agency’s interpretation would be warranted under Chevron . 544 F. Supp. 3d 82, 107 (DC 2021); see id. , at 103–107.

 A divided panel of the D. C. Circuit affirmed. See 45 F. 4th 359 (2022). The majority addressed various provisions of the MSA and concluded that it was not “wholly unambiguous” whether NMFS may require Atlantic herring fishermen to pay for observers. Id. , at 366. Because there remained “some question” as to Congress’s intent, id. , at 369, the court proceeded to Chevron ’s second step and deferred to the agency’s interpretation as a “reasonable” construction of the MSA, 45 F. 4th, at 370. In dissent, Judge Walker concluded that Congress’s silence on industry funded observers for the Atlantic herring fishery—coupled with the express provision for such observers in other fisheries and on foreign vessels—unambiguously indicated that NMFS lacked the authority to “require [Atlantic herring] fishermen to pay the wages of at-sea monitors.” Id. , at 375.

 Petitioners Relentless Inc., Huntress Inc., and Seafreeze Fleet LLC own two vessels that operate in the Atlantic herring fishery: the F/V Relentless and the F/V Persistence . 1 These vessels use small-mesh bottom-trawl gear and can freeze fish at sea, so they can catch more species of fish and take longer trips than other vessels (about 10 to 14 days, as  opposed to the more typical 2 to 4). As a result, they generally declare into multiple fisheries per trip so they can catch whatever the ocean offers up. If the vessels declare into the Atlantic herring fishery for a particular trip, they must carry an observer for that trip if NMFS selects the trip for coverage, even if they end up harvesting fewer herring than other vessels—or no herring at all.

 This set of petitioners, like those in the D. C. Circuit case, filed a suit challenging the Rule as unauthorized by the MSA. The District Court, like the D. C. Circuit, deferred to NMFS’s contrary interpretation under Chevron and thus granted summary judgment to the Government. See 561 F. Supp. 3d 226, 234–238 (RI 2021).

 The First Circuit affirmed. See 62 F. 4th 621 (2023). It relied on a “default norm” that regulated entities must bear compliance costs, as well as the MSA’s sanctions provision, Section 1858(g)(1)(D). See id. , at 629–631. And it rejected petitioners’ argument that the express statutory authorization of three industry funding programs demonstrated that NMFS lacked the broad implicit authority it asserted to impose such a program for the Atlantic herring fishery. See id. , at 631–633. The court ultimately concluded that the “[a]gency’s interpretation of its authority to require at-sea monitors who are paid for by owners of regulated vessels does not ‘exceed[ ] the bounds of the permissible.’ ” Id. , at 633–634 (quoting Barnhart v. Walton , 535 U. S. 212 , 218 (2002); alteration in original). In reaching that conclusion, the First Circuit stated that it was applying Chevron ’s two-step framework. 62 F. 4th, at 628. But it did not explain which aspects of its analysis were relevant to which of Chevron ’s two steps. Similarly, it declined to decide whether the result was “a product of Chevron step one or step two.” Id. , at 634.

 We granted certiorari in both cases, limited to the question whether Chevron should be overruled or clarified. See  601 U. S. ___ (2023); 598 U. S. ___ (2023). 2

 Article III of the Constitution assigns to the Federal Judiciary the responsibility and power to adjudicate “Cases” and “Controversies”—concrete disputes with consequences for the parties involved. The Framers appreciated that the laws judges would necessarily apply in resolving those disputes would not always be clear. Cognizant of the limits of human language and foresight, they anticipated that “[a]ll new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation,” would be “more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning” was settled “by a series of particular discussions and adjudications.” The Federalist No. 37, p. 236 (J. Cooke ed. 1961) (J. Madison).

 The Framers also envisioned that the final “interpretation of the laws” would be “the proper and peculiar province of the courts.” Id. , No. 78, at 525 (A. Hamilton). Unlike the political branches, the courts would by design exercise “neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment.” Id. , at 523. To ensure the “steady, upright and impartial administration of the laws,” the Framers structured the Constitution to allow judges to exercise that judgment independent of influence from the political branches. Id. , at 522; see id. , at 522–524; Stern v. Marshall , 564 U. S. 462 , 484 (2011).

 This Court embraced the Framers’ understanding of the judicial function early on. In the foundational decision of Marbury v. Madison , Chief Justice Marshall famously declared that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” 1 Cranch 137,  177 (1803). And in the following decades, the Court understood “interpret[ing] the laws, in the last resort,” to be a “solemn duty” of the Judiciary. United States v. Dickson , 15 Pet. 141, 162 (1841) (Story, J., for the Court). When the meaning of a statute was at issue, the judicial role was to “interpret the act of Congress, in order to ascertain the rights of the parties.” Decatur v. Paulding , 14 Pet. 497, 515 (1840).

 The Court also recognized from the outset, though, that exercising independent judgment often included according due respect to Executive Branch interpretations of federal statutes. For example, in Edwards’ Lessee v. Darby , 12 Wheat. 206 (1827), the Court explained that “[i]n the construction of a doubtful and ambiguous law, the contemporaneous construction of those who were called upon to act under the law, and were appointed to carry its provisions into effect, is entitled to very great respect.” Id. , at 210; see also United States v. Vowell , 5 Cranch 368, 372 (1809) (Marshall, C. J., for the Court).

 Such respect was thought especially warranted when an Executive Branch interpretation was issued roughly contemporaneously with enactment of the statute and remained consistent over time. See Dickson , 15 Pet., at 161; United States v. Alabama Great Southern R. Co. , 142 U. S. 615 , 621 (1892); National Lead Co. v. United States , 252 U. S. 140 , 145–146 (1920). That is because “the longstanding ‘practice of the government’ ”—like any other interpretive aid—“can inform [a court’s] determination of ‘what the law is.’ ” NLRB v. Noel Canning , 573 U. S. 513 , 525 (2014) (first quoting McCulloch v. Maryland , 4 Wheat. 316, 401 (1819); then quoting Marbury , 1 Cranch, at 177). The Court also gave “the most respectful consideration” to Executive Branch interpretations simply because “[t]he officers concerned [were] usually able men, and masters of the subject,” who were “[n]ot unfrequently . . . the draftsmen of the laws they [were] afterwards called upon to interpret.” United States v. Moore , 95 U. S. 760 , 763 (1878); see also Jacobs v. Prichard , 223 U. S. 200 , 214 (1912).

 “Respect,” though, was just that. The views of the Executive Branch could inform the judgment of the Judiciary, but did not supersede it. Whatever respect an Executive Branch interpretation was due, a judge “certainly would not be bound to adopt the construction given by the head of a department.” Decatur , 14 Pet., at 515; see also Burnet v. Chicago Portrait Co. , 285 U. S. 1 , 16 (1932). Otherwise, judicial judgment would not be independent at all. As Justice Story put it, “in cases where [a court’s] own judgment . . . differ[ed] from that of other high functionaries,” the court was “not at liberty to surrender, or to waive it.” Dickson , 15 Pet., at 162.

 The New Deal ushered in a “rapid expansion of the administrative process.” United States v. Morton Salt Co. , 338 U. S. 632 , 644 (1950). But as new agencies with new powers proliferated, the Court continued to adhere to the traditional understanding that questions of law were for courts to decide, exercising independent judgment.

 During this period, the Court often treated agency determinations of fact as binding on the courts, provided that there was “evidence to support the findings.” St. Joseph Stock Yards Co. v. United States , 298 U. S. 38 , 51 (1936). “When the legislature itself acts within the broad field of legislative discretion,” the Court reasoned, “its determinations are conclusive.” Ibid. Congress could therefore “appoint[ ] an agent to act within that sphere of legislative authority” and “endow the agent with power to make findings of fact which are conclusive, provided the requirements of due process which are specially applicable to such an agency are met, as in according a fair hearing and acting upon evidence and not arbitrarily.” Ibid. (emphasis added).

 But the Court did not extend similar deference to agency  resolutions of questions of law . It instead made clear, repeatedly, that “[t]he interpretation of the meaning of statutes, as applied to justiciable controversies,” was “exclusively a judicial function.” United States v. American Trucking Assns., Inc. , 310 U. S. 534 , 544 (1940); see also Social Security Bd. v. Nierotko , 327 U. S. 358 , 369 (1946); Medo Photo Supply Corp. v. NLRB , 321 U. S. 678 , 681–682, n. 1 (1944). The Court understood, in the words of Justice Brandeis, that “[t]he supremacy of law demands that there shall be opportunity to have some court decide whether an erroneous rule of law was applied.” St. Joseph Stock Yards , 298 U. S., at 84 (concurring opinion). It also continued to note, as it long had, that the informed judgment of the Executive Branch—especially in the form of an interpretation issued contemporaneously with the enactment of the statute—could be entitled to “great weight.” American Trucking Assns. , 310 U. S., at 549.

 Perhaps most notably along those lines, in Skidmore v. Swift & Co. , 323 U. S. 134 (1944) , the Court explained that the “interpretations and opinions” of the relevant agency, “made in pursuance of official duty” and “based upon . . . specialized experience,” “constitute[d] a body of experience and informed judgment to which courts and litigants [could] properly resort for guidance,” even on legal questions. Id. , at 139–140. “The weight of such a judgment in a particular case,” the Court observed, would “depend upon the thoroughness evident in its consideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency with earlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors which give it power to persuade, if lacking power to control.” Id. , at 140.

 On occasion, to be sure, the Court applied deferential review upon concluding that a particular statute empowered an agency to decide how a broad statutory term applied to specific facts found by the agency. For example, in Gray v. Powell , 314 U. S. 402 (1941) , the Court deferred to an administrative conclusion that a coal-burning railroad that  had arrangements with several coal mines was not a coal “producer” under the Bituminous Coal Act of 1937. Congress had “specifically” granted the agency the authority to make that determination. Id. , at 411. The Court thus reasoned that “[w]here, as here, a determination has been left to an administrative body, this delegation will be respected and the administrative conclusion left untouched” so long as the agency’s decision constituted “a sensible exercise of judgment.” Id. , at 412–413. Similarly, in NLRB v. Hearst Publications, Inc. , 322 U. S. 111 (1944) , the Court deferred to the determination of the National Labor Relations Board that newsboys were “employee[s]” within the meaning of the National Labor Relations Act. The Act had, in the Court’s judgment, “assigned primarily” to the Board the task of marking a “definitive limitation around the term ‘employee.’ ” Id. , at 130. The Court accordingly viewed its own role as “limited” to assessing whether the Board’s determination had a “ ‘warrant in the record’ and a reasonable basis in law.” Id. , at 131.

 Such deferential review, though, was cabined to factbound determinations like those at issue in Gray and Hearst . Neither Gray nor Hearst purported to refashion the longstanding judicial approach to questions of law. In Gray , after deferring to the agency’s determination that a particular entity was not a “producer” of coal, the Court went on to discern, based on its own reading of the text, whether another statutory term—“other disposal” of coal—encompassed a transaction lacking a transfer of title. See 314 U. S., at 416–417. The Court evidently perceived no basis for deference to the agency with respect to that pure legal question. And in Hearst , the Court proclaimed that “[u]ndoubtedly questions of statutory interpretation . . . are for the courts to resolve, giving appropriate weight to the judgment of those whose special duty is to administer the questioned statute.” 322 U. S., at 130–131. At least with  respect to questions it regarded as involving “statutory interpretation,” the Court thus did not disturb the traditional rule. It merely thought that a different approach should apply where application of a statutory term was sufficiently intertwined with the agency’s factfinding.

 In any event, the Court was far from consistent in reviewing deferentially even such factbound statutory determinations. Often the Court simply interpreted and applied the statute before it. See K. Davis, Administrative Law §248, p. 893 (1951) (“The one statement that can be made with confidence about applicability of the doctrine of Gray v. Powell is that sometimes the Supreme Court applies it and sometimes it does not.”); B. Schwartz, Gray vs. Powell and the Scope of Review, 54 Mich. L. Rev. 1, 68 (1955) (noting an “embarrassingly large number of Supreme Court decisions that do not adhere to the doctrine of Gray v. Powell ”). In one illustrative example, the Court rejected the U. S. Price Administrator’s determination that a particular warehouse was a “public utility” entitled to an exemption from the Administrator’s General Maximum Price Regulation. Despite the striking resemblance of that administrative determination to those that triggered deference in Gray and Hearst , the Court declined to “accept the Administrator’s view in deference to administrative construction.” Davies Warehouse Co. v. Bowles , 321 U. S. 144 , 156 (1944). The Administrator’s view, the Court explained, had “hardly seasoned or broadened into a settled administrative practice,” and thus did not “overweigh the considerations” the Court had “set forth as to the proper construction of the statute.” Ibid.

 Nothing in the New Deal era or before it thus resembled the deference rule the Court would begin applying decades later to all varieties of agency interpretations of statutes. Instead, just five years after Gray and two after Hearst , Congress codified the opposite rule: the traditional understanding that courts must “decide all relevant questions of  law.” 5 U. S. C. §706 . 3

 Congress in 1946 enacted the APA “as a check upon administrators whose zeal might otherwise have carried them to excesses not contemplated in legislation creating their offices.” Morton Salt , 338 U. S., at 644. It was the culmination of a “comprehensive rethinking of the place of administrative agencies in a regime of separate and divided powers.” Bowen v. Michigan Academy of Family Physicians , 476 U. S. 667 , 670–671 (1986).

 In addition to prescribing procedures for agency action, the APA delineates the basic contours of judicial review of such action. As relevant here, Section 706 directs that “[t]o  the extent necessary to decision and when presented, the reviewing court shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action.” 5 U. S. C. §706 . It further requires courts to “hold unlawful and set aside agency action, findings, and conclusions found to be . . . not in accordance with law.” §706(2)(A).

 The APA thus codifies for agency cases the unremarkable, yet elemental proposition reflected by judicial practice dating back to Marbury : that courts decide legal questions by applying their own judgment. It specifies that courts, not agencies, will decide “ all relevant questions of law” arising on review of agency action, §706 (emphasis added)—even those involving ambiguous laws—and set aside any such action inconsistent with the law as they interpret it. And it prescribes no deferential standard for courts to employ in answering those legal questions. That omission is telling, because Section 706 does mandate that judicial review of agency policymaking and factfinding be deferential. See §706(2)(A) (agency action to be set aside if “arbitrary, capricious, [or] an abuse of discretion”); §706(2)(E) (agency factfinding in formal proceedings to be set aside if “unsupported by substantial evidence”).

 In a statute designed to “serve as the fundamental charter of the administrative state,” Kisor v. Wilkie , 588 U. S. 558 , 580 (2019) (plurality opinion) (internal quotation marks omitted), Congress surely would have articulated a similarly deferential standard applicable to questions of law had it intended to depart from the settled pre-APA understanding that deciding such questions was “exclusively a judicial function,” American Trucking Assns. , 310 U. S., at 544. But nothing in the APA hints at such a dramatic departure. On the contrary, by directing courts to “interpret constitutional and statutory provisions” without differentiating between the two, Section 706 makes clear that  agency interpretations of statutes—like agency interpretations of the Constitution—are not entitled to deference. Under the APA, it thus “remains the responsibility of the court to decide whether the law means what the agency says.” Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Assn. , 575 U. S. 92 , 109 (2015) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment). 4

 The text of the APA means what it says. And a look at its history if anything only underscores that plain meaning. According to both the House and Senate Reports on the legislation, Section 706 “provide[d] that questions of law are for courts rather than agencies to decide in the last analysis.” H. R. Rep. No. 1980, 79th Cong., 2d Sess., 44 (1946) (emphasis added); accord, S. Rep. No. 752, 79th Cong., 1st Sess., 28 (1945). Some of the legislation’s most prominent supporters articulated the same view. See 92 Cong. Rec. 5654 (1946) (statement of Rep. Walter); P. McCarran, Improving “Administrative Justice”: Hearings and Evidence; Scope of Judicial Review, 32 A. B. A. J. 827, 831 (1946). Even the Department of Justice—an agency with every incentive to endorse a view of the APA favorable to the Executive Branch—opined after its enactment that Section 706 merely “restate[d] the present law as to the scope of judicial review.” Dept. of Justice, Attorney General’s Manual on the  Administrative Procedure Act 108 (1947); see also Kisor , 588 U. S., at 582 (plurality opinion) (same). That “present law,” as we have described, adhered to the traditional conception of the judicial function. See supra , at 9–13.

 Various respected commentators contemporaneously maintained that the APA required reviewing courts to exercise independent judgment on questions of law. Professor John Dickinson, for example, read the APA to “impose a clear mandate that all [questions of law] shall be decided by the reviewing Court itself, and in the exercise of its own independent judgment.” Administrative Procedure Act: Scope and Grounds of Broadened Judicial Review, 33 A. B. A. J. 434, 516 (1947). Professor Bernard Schwartz noted that §706 “would seem . . . to be merely a legislative restatement of the familiar review principle that questions of law are for the reviewing court, at the same time leaving to the courts the task of determining in each case what are questions of law.” Mixed Questions of Law and Fact and the Administrative Procedure Act, 19 Ford. L. Rev. 73, 84–85 (1950). And Professor Louis Jaffe, who had served in several agencies at the advent of the New Deal, thought that §706 leaves it up to the reviewing “court” to “decide as a ‘question of law’ whether there is ‘discretion’ in the premises”—that is, whether the statute at issue delegates particular discretionary authority to an agency. Judicial Control of Administrative Action 570 (1965).

 The APA, in short, incorporates the traditional understanding of the judicial function, under which courts must exercise independent judgment in determining the meaning of statutory provisions. In exercising such judgment, though, courts may—as they have from the start—seek aid from the interpretations of those responsible for implementing particular statutes. Such interpretations “constitute a body of experience and informed judgment to which courts and litigants may properly resort for guidance” consistent with the APA. Skidmore , 323 U. S., at 140. And  interpretations issued contemporaneously with the statute at issue, and which have remained consistent over time, may be especially useful in determining the statute’s meaning. See ibid. ; American Trucking Assns. , 310 U. S., at 549.

 In a case involving an agency, of course, the statute’s meaning may well be that the agency is authorized to exercise a degree of discretion. Congress has often enacted such statutes. For example, some statutes “expressly delegate[ ]” to an agency the authority to give meaning to a particular statutory term. Batterton v. Francis , 432 U. S. 416 , 425 (1977) (emphasis deleted). 5 Others empower an agency to prescribe rules to “fill up the details” of a statutory scheme, Wayman v. Southard , 10 Wheat. 1, 43 (1825), or to regulate subject to the limits imposed by a term or phrase that “leaves agencies with flexibility,” Michigan v. EPA , 576 U. S. 743 , 752 (2015), such as “appropriate” or “reasonable.” 6

 When the best reading of a statute is that it delegates  discretionary authority to an agency, the role of the reviewing court under the APA is, as always, to independently interpret the statute and effectuate the will of Congress subject to constitutional limits. The court fulfills that role by recognizing constitutional delegations, “fix[ing] the boundaries of [the] delegated authority,” H. Monaghan, Marbury and the Administrative State, 83 Colum. L. Rev. 1, 27 (1983), and ensuring the agency has engaged in “ ‘reasoned decisionmaking’ ” within those boundaries, Michigan , 576 U. S., at 750 (quoting Allentown Mack Sales & Service, Inc. v. NLRB , 522 U. S. 359 , 374 (1998)); see also Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Assn. of United States, Inc. v. State Farm Mut. Automobile Ins. Co. , 463 U. S. 29 (1983) . By doing so, a court upholds the traditional conception of the judicial function that the APA adopts.

 The deference that Chevron requires of courts reviewing agency action cannot be squared with the APA.

 In the decades between the enactment of the APA and this Court’s decision in Chevron , courts generally continued to review agency interpretations of the statutes they administer by independently examining each statute to determine its meaning. Cf. T. Merrill, Judicial Deference to Executive Precedent, 101 Yale L. J. 969, 972–975 (1992). As an early proponent (and later critic) of Chevron recounted, courts during this period thus identified delegations of discretionary authority to agencies on a “statute-by-statute basis.” A. Scalia, Judicial Deference to Administrative Interpretations of Law, 1989 Duke L. J. 511, 516.

  Chevron , decided in 1984 by a bare quorum of six Justices, triggered a marked departure from the traditional approach. The question in the case was whether an EPA regulation “allow[ing] States to treat all of the pollution- emitting devices within the same industrial grouping as though they were encased within a single ‘bubble’ ” was consistent with the term “stationary source” as used in the Clean Air Act. 467 U. S., at 840. To answer that question of statutory interpretation, the Court articulated and employed a now familiar two-step approach broadly applicable to review of agency action.

 The first step was to discern “whether Congress ha[d] directly spoken to the precise question at issue.” Id. , at 842. The Court explained that “[i]f the intent of Congress is clear, that is the end of the matter,” ibid. , and courts were therefore to “reject administrative constructions which are contrary to clear congressional intent,” id. , at 843, n. 9. To discern such intent, the Court noted, a reviewing court was to “employ[ ] traditional tools of statutory construction.” Ibid.

 Without mentioning the APA, or acknowledging any doctrinal shift, the Court articulated a second step applicable when “Congress ha[d] not directly addressed the precise question at issue.” Id. , at 843. In such a case—that is, a case in which “the statute [was] silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue” at hand — a reviewing court could not “simply impose its own construction on the statute, as would be necessary in the absence of an administrative interpretation.” Ibid. (footnote omitted). A court instead had to set aside the traditional interpretive tools and defer to the agency if it had offered “a permissible construction of the statute,” ibid. , even if not “the reading the court would have reached if the question initially had arisen in a judicial proceeding,” ibid. , n. 11. That directive was justified, according to the Court, by the understanding that administering statutes “requires the formulation of policy” to fill statutory “gap[s]”; by the long judicial tradition of according “considerable weight” to Executive Branch interpretations; and by a host of other considerations, including the complexity of the regulatory scheme, EPA’s “detailed  and reasoned” consideration, the policy-laden nature of the judgment supposedly required, and the agency’s indirect accountability to the people through the President. Id. , at 843, 844, and n. 14, 865.

 Employing this new test, the Court concluded that Congress had not addressed the question at issue with the necessary “level of specificity” and that EPA’s interpretation was “entitled to deference.” Id. , at 865. It did not matter why Congress, as the Court saw it, had not squarely addressed the question, see ibid. , or that “the agency ha[d] from time to time changed its interpretation,” id. , at 863. The latest EPA interpretation was a permissible reading of the Clean Air Act, so under the Court’s new rule, that reading controlled.

 Initially, Chevron “seemed destined to obscurity.” T. Merrill, The Story of Chevron : The Making of an Accidental Landmark, 66 Admin. L. Rev. 253, 276 (2014). The Court did not at first treat it as the watershed decision it was fated to become; it was hardly cited in cases involving statutory questions of agency authority. See ibid. But within a few years, both this Court and the courts of appeals were routinely invoking its two-step framework as the governing standard in such cases. See id. , at 276–277. As the Court did so, it revisited the doctrine’s justifications. Eventually, the Court decided that Chevron rested on “a presumption that Congress, when it left ambiguity in a statute meant for implementation by an agency, understood that the ambiguity would be resolved, first and foremost, by the agency, and desired the agency (rather than the courts) to possess whatever degree of discretion the ambiguity allows.” Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota), N. A. , 517 U. S. 735 , 740–741 (1996); see also, e.g. , Cuozzo Speed Technologies, LLC v. Lee , 579 U. S. 261 , 276–277 (2016); Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA , 573 U. S. 302 , 315 (2014); National Cable & Telecommunications Assn. v. Brand X Internet Services , 545 U. S. 967 , 982 (2005).

 Neither Chevron nor any subsequent decision of this Court attempted to reconcile its framework with the APA. The “law of deference” that this Court has built on the foundation laid in Chevron has instead been “[h]eedless of the original design” of the APA. Perez , 575 U. S., at 109 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment).

 Chevron defies the command of the APA that “the reviewing court”—not the agency whose action it reviews—is to “decide all relevant questions of law” and “interpret . . . statutory provisions.” §706 (emphasis added). It requires a court to ignore , not follow, “the reading the court would have reached” had it exercised its independent judgment as required by the APA. Chevron , 467 U. S., at 843, n. 11. And although exercising independent judgment is consistent with the “respect” historically given to Executive Branch interpretations, see, e.g. , Edwards’ Lessee , 12 Wheat., at 210; Skidmore , 323 U. S., at 140, Chevron insists on much more. It demands that courts mechanically afford binding deference to agency interpretations, including those that have been inconsistent over time. See 467 U. S., at 863. Still worse, it forces courts to do so even when a pre-existing judicial precedent holds that the statute means something else—unless the prior court happened to also say that the statute is “unambiguous.” Brand X , 545 U. S., at 982. That regime is the antithesis of the time honored approach the APA prescribes. In fretting over the prospect of “allow[ing]” a judicial interpretation of a statute “to override an agency’s” in a dispute before a court, ibid. , Chevron turns the statutory scheme for judicial review of agency action upside down.

  Chevron cannot be reconciled with the APA, as the Government and the dissent contend, by presuming that statutory ambiguities are implicit delegations to agencies. See  Brief for Respondents in No. 22–1219, pp. 13, 37–38; post , at 4–15 (opinion of Kagan , J.). Presumptions have their place in statutory interpretation, but only to the extent that they approximate reality. Chevron ’s presumption does not, because “[a]n ambiguity is simply not a delegation of law-interpreting power. Chevron confuses the two.” C. Sunstein, Interpreting Statutes in the Regulatory State, 103 Harv. L. Rev. 405, 445 (1989). As Chevron itself noted, ambiguities may result from an inability on the part of Congress to squarely answer the question at hand, or from a failure to even “consider the question” with the requisite precision. 467 U. S., at 865. In neither case does an ambiguity necessarily reflect a congressional intent that an agency, as opposed to a court, resolve the resulting interpretive question. And many or perhaps most statutory ambiguities may be unintentional. As the Framers recognized, ambiguities will inevitably follow from “the complexity of objects, . . . the imperfection of the human faculties,” and the simple fact that “no language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea.” The Federalist No. 37, at 236.

 Courts, after all, routinely confront statutory ambiguities in cases having nothing to do with Chevron —cases that do not involve agency interpretations or delegations of authority. Of course, when faced with a statutory ambiguity in such a case, the ambiguity is not a delegation to anybody, and a court is not somehow relieved of its obligation to independently interpret the statute. Courts in that situation do not throw up their hands because “Congress’s instructions have” supposedly “run out,” leaving a statutory “gap.” Post , at 2 (opinion of Kagan , J.). Courts instead understand that such statutes, no matter how impenetrable, do—in fact, must—have a single, best meaning. That is the whole point of having written statutes; “every statute’s meaning is fixed at the time of enactment.” Wisconsin Central Ltd. v. United States , 585 U. S. 274 , 284 (2018) (emphasis deleted). So instead of declaring a particular party’s reading “permissible” in such a case, courts use every tool at their disposal to determine the best reading of the statute and resolve the ambiguity.

 In an agency case as in any other, though, even if some judges might (or might not) consider the statute ambiguous, there is a best reading all the same—“the reading the court would have reached” if no agency were involved. Chevron , 467 U. S., at 843, n. 11. It therefore makes no sense to speak of a “permissible” interpretation that is not the one the court, after applying all relevant interpretive tools, concludes is best. In the business of statutory interpretation, if it is not the best, it is not permissible.

  Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron ’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do. The Framers, as noted, anticipated that courts would often confront statutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve them by exercising independent legal judgment. And even Chevron itself reaffirmed that “[t]he judiciary is the final authority on issues of statutory construction” and recognized that “in the absence of an administrative interpretation,” it is “necessary” for a court to “impose its own construction on the statute.” Id. , at 843, and n. 9. Chevron gravely erred, though, in concluding that the inquiry is fundamentally different just because an administrative interpretation is in play. The very point of the traditional tools of statutory construction—the tools courts use every day—is to resolve statutory ambiguities. That is no less true when the ambiguity is about the scope of an agency’s own power—perhaps the occasion on which abdication in favor of the agency is least appropriate.

 The Government responds that Congress must generally  intend for agencies to resolve statutory ambiguities because agencies have subject matter expertise regarding the statutes they administer; because deferring to agencies purportedly promotes the uniform construction of federal law; and because resolving statutory ambiguities can involve policymaking best left to political actors, rather than courts. See Brief for Respondents in No. 22–1219, pp. 16–19. The dissent offers more of the same. See post , at 9–14. But none of these considerations justifies Chevron ’s sweeping presumption of congressional intent.

 Beginning with expertise, we recently noted that interpretive issues arising in connection with a regulatory scheme often “may fall more naturally into a judge’s bailiwick” than an agency’s. Kisor , 588 U. S., at 578 (opinion of the Court). We thus observed that “[w]hen the agency has no comparative expertise in resolving a regulatory ambiguity, Congress presumably would not grant it that authority.” Ibid. Chevron ’s broad rule of deference, though, demands that courts presume just the opposite. Under that rule, ambiguities of all stripes trigger deference. Indeed, the Government and, seemingly, the dissent continue to defend the proposition that Chevron applies even in cases having little to do with an agency’s technical subject matter expertise. See Brief for Respondents in No. 22–1219, p. 17; post , at 10.

 But even when an ambiguity happens to implicate a technical matter, it does not follow that Congress has taken the power to authoritatively interpret the statute from the courts and given it to the agency. Congress expects courts to handle technical statutory questions. “[M]any statutory cases” call upon “courts [to] interpret the mass of technical detail that is the ordinary diet of the law,” Egelhoff v. Egelhoff , 532 U. S. 141 , 161 (2001) (Breyer, J., dissenting), and courts did so without issue in agency cases before Chevron , see post , at 30 ( Gorsuch, J., concurring). Courts, after all, do not decide such questions blindly. The parties and amici in such cases are steeped in the subject matter, and reviewing courts have the benefit of their perspectives. In an agency case in particular, the court will go about its task with the agency’s “body of experience and informed judgment,” among other information, at its disposal. Skidmore , 323 U. S., at 140. And although an agency’s interpretation of a statute “cannot bind a court,” it may be especially informative “to the extent it rests on factual premises within [the agency’s] expertise.” Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms v. FLRA , 464 U. S. 89 , 98, n. 8 (1983). Such expertise has always been one of the factors which may give an Executive Branch interpretation particular “power to persuade, if lacking power to control.” Skidmore , 323 U. S., at 140; see, e.g. , County of Maui v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund , 590 U. S. 165 , 180 (2020); Moore , 95 U. S., at 763.

 For those reasons, delegating ultimate interpretive authority to agencies is simply not necessary to ensure that the resolution of statutory ambiguities is well informed by subject matter expertise. The better presumption is therefore that Congress expects courts to do their ordinary job of interpreting statutes, with due respect for the views of the Executive Branch. And to the extent that Congress and the Executive Branch may disagree with how the courts have performed that job in a particular case, they are of course always free to act by revising the statute.

 Nor does a desire for the uniform construction of federal law justify Chevron . Given inconsistencies in how judges apply Chevron , see infra , at 30–33, it is unclear how much the doctrine as a whole (as opposed to its highly deferential second step) actually promotes such uniformity. In any event, there is little value in imposing a uniform interpretation of a statute if that interpretation is wrong. We see no reason to presume that Congress prefers uniformity for uniformity’s sake over the correct interpretation of the laws it enacts.

  The view that interpretation of ambiguous statutory provisions amounts to policymaking suited for political actors rather than courts is especially mistaken, for it rests on a profound misconception of the judicial role. It is reasonable to assume that Congress intends to leave policymaking to political actors. But resolution of statutory ambiguities involves legal interpretation. That task does not suddenly become policymaking just because a court has an “agency to fall back on.” Kisor , 588 U. S., at 575 (opinion of the Court). Courts interpret statutes, no matter the context, based on the traditional tools of statutory construction, not individual policy preferences. Indeed, the Framers crafted the Constitution to ensure that federal judges could exercise judgment free from the influence of the political branches. See The Federalist, No. 78, at 522–525. They were to construe the law with “[c]lear heads . . . and honest hearts,” not with an eye to policy preferences that had not made it into the statute. 1 Works of James Wilson 363 (J. Andrews ed. 1896).

 That is not to say that Congress cannot or does not confer discretionary authority on agencies. Congress may do so, subject to constitutional limits, and it often has. But to stay out of discretionary policymaking left to the political branches, judges need only fulfill their obligations under the APA to independently identify and respect such delegations of authority, police the outer statutory boundaries of those delegations, and ensure that agencies exercise their discretion consistent with the APA. By forcing courts to instead pretend that ambiguities are necessarily delegations, Chevron does not prevent judges from making policy. It prevents them from judging.

 In truth, Chevron ’s justifying presumption is, as Members of this Court have often recognized, a fiction. See Buffington v. McDonough , 598 U. S. ___, ___ (2022) ( Gorsuch ,  J., dissenting from denial of certiorari) (slip op., at 11); Cuozzo , 579 U. S., at 286 ( Thomas , J., concurring); Scalia, 1989 Duke L. J., at 517; see also post , at 15 (opinion of Kagan , J.). So we have spent the better part of four decades imposing one limitation on Chevron after another, pruning its presumption on the understanding that “where it is in doubt that Congress actually intended to delegate particular interpretive authority to an agency, Chevron is ‘inapplicable.’ ” United States v. Mead Corp. , 533 U. S. 218 , 230 (2001) (quoting Christensen v. Harris County , 529 U. S. 576 , 597 (2000) (Breyer, J., dissenting)); see also Adams Fruit Co. v. Barrett , 494 U. S. 638 , 649 (1990).

 Consider the many refinements we have made in an effort to match Chevron ’s presumption to reality. We have said that Chevron applies only “when it appears that Congress delegated authority to the agency generally to make rules carrying the force of law, and that the agency interpretation claiming deference was promulgated in the exercise of that authority.” Mead , 533 U. S., at 226–227. In practice, that threshold requirement—sometimes called Chevron “step zero”—largely limits Chevron to “the fruits of notice-and-comment rulemaking or formal adjudication.” 533 U. S., at 230. But even when those processes are used, deference is still not warranted “where the regulation is ‘procedurally defective’—that is, where the agency errs by failing to follow the correct procedures in issuing the regulation.” Encino Motorcars, LLC v. Navarro , 579 U. S. 211 , 220 (2016) (quoting Mead , 533 U. S., at 227).

 Even where those procedural hurdles are cleared, substantive ones remain. Most notably, Chevron does not apply if the question at issue is one of “deep ‘economic and political significance.’ ” King v. Burwell , 576 U. S. 473 , 486 (2015). We have instead expected Congress to delegate such authority “expressly” if at all, ibid. , for “[e]xtraordinary grants of regulatory authority are rarely accomplished through ‘modest words,’ ‘vague terms,’ or ‘subtle device[s],’ ” West Virginia v. EPA , 597 U. S. 697 , 723 (2022) (quoting Whitman v. American Trucking Assns., Inc. , 531 U. S. 457 , 468 (2001); alteration in original). Nor have we applied Chevron to agency interpretations of judicial review provisions, see Adams Fruit Co. , 494 U. S., at 649–650, or to statutory schemes not administered by the agency seeking deference, see Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis , 584 U. S. 497 , 519–520 (2018). And we have sent mixed signals on whether Chevron applies when a statute has criminal applications. Compare Abramski v. United States , 573 U. S. 169 , 191 (2014), with Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter, Communities for Great Ore. , 515 U. S. 687 , 704, n. 18 (1995).

 Confronted with this byzantine set of preconditions and exceptions, some courts have simply bypassed Chevron , saying it makes no difference for one reason or another. 7 And even when they do invoke Chevron , courts do not always heed the various steps and nuances of that evolving doctrine. In one of the cases before us today, for example, the First Circuit both skipped “step zero,” see 62 F. 4th, at 628, and refused to “classify [its] conclusion as a product of Chevron step one or step two”—though it ultimately appears to have deferred under step two, id. , at 634.

  This Court, for its part, has not deferred to an agency interpretation under Chevron since 2016. See Cuozzo , 579 U. S., at 280 (most recent occasion). But Chevron remains on the books. So litigants must continue to wrestle with it, and lower courts—bound by even our crumbling precedents, see Agostini v. Felton , 521 U. S. 203 , 238 (1997)—understandably continue to apply it.

 The experience of the last 40 years has thus done little to rehabilitate Chevron . It has only made clear that Chevron ’s fictional presumption of congressional intent was always unmoored from the APA’s demand that courts exercise independent judgment in construing statutes administered by agencies. At best, our intricate Chevron doctrine has been nothing more than a distraction from the question that matters: Does the statute authorize the challenged agency action? And at worst, it has required courts to violate the APA by yielding to an agency the express responsibility, vested in “the reviewing court ,” to “decide all relevant questions of law” and “interpret . . . statutory provisions.” §706 (emphasis added).

 The only question left is whether stare decisis , the doctrine governing judicial adherence to precedent, requires us to persist in the Chevron project. It does not. Stare decisis is not an “inexorable command,” Payne v. Tennessee , 501 U. S. 808 , 828 (1991), and the stare decisis considerations most relevant here—“the quality of [the precedent’s] reasoning, the workability of the rule it established, . . . and reliance on the decision,” Knick v. Township of Scott , 588 U. S. 180 , 203 (2019) (quoting Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees , 585 U. S. 878 , 917 (2018))—all weigh in favor of letting Chevron go.

  Chevron has proved to be fundamentally misguided. Despite reshaping judicial review of agency action, neither it nor any case of ours applying it grappled with the APA— the statute that lays out how such review works. Its flaws were nonetheless apparent from the start, prompting this Court to revise its foundations and continually limit its application. It has launched and sustained a cottage industry of scholars attempting to decipher its basis and meaning. And Members of this Court have long questioned its premises. See, e . g ., Pereira v. Sessions , 585 U. S. 198 , 219–221 (2018) (Kennedy, J., concurring); Michigan , 576 U. S., at 760–764 ( Thomas , J., concurring); Buffington , 598 U. S. ___ (opinion of Gorsuch , J.); B. Kavanaugh, Fixing Statutory Interpretation, 129 Harv. L. Rev. 2118, 2150–2154 (2016). Even Justice Scalia, an early champion of Chevron , came to seriously doubt whether it could be reconciled with the APA. See Perez , 575 U. S., at 109–110 (opinion concurring in judgment). For its entire existence, Chevron has been a “rule in search of a justification,” Knick , 588 U. S., at 204, if it was ever coherent enough to be called a rule at all.

 Experience has also shown that Chevron is unworkable. The defining feature of its framework is the identification of statutory ambiguity, which requires deference at the doctrine’s second step. But the concept of ambiguity has always evaded meaningful definition. As Justice Scalia put the dilemma just five years after Chevron was decided: “How clear is clear?” 1989 Duke L. J., at 521.

 We are no closer to an answer to that question than we were four decades ago. “ ‘[A]mbiguity’ is a term that may have different meanings for different judges.” Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Allapattah Services, Inc. , 545 U. S. 546 , 572 (2005) (Stevens, J., dissenting). One judge might see ambiguity everywhere; another might never encounter it. Compare L. Silberman, Chevron—The Intersection of Law & Policy, 58 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 821, 822 (1990), with R. Kethledge, Ambiguities and Agency Cases: Reflections After (Almost) Ten Years on the Bench, 70 Vand. L. Rev. En Banc 315, 323 (2017). A rule of law that is so wholly “in the eye of the  beholder,” Exxon Mobil Corp. , 545 U. S., at 572 (Stevens, J., dissenting), invites different results in like cases and is therefore “arbitrary in practice,” Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. v. Mayacamas Corp. , 485 U. S. 271 , 283 (1988). Such an impressionistic and malleable concept “cannot stand as an every-day test for allocating” interpretive authority between courts and agencies. Swift & Co. v. Wickham , 382 U. S. 111 , 125 (1965).

 The dissent proves the point. It tells us that a court should reach Chevron ’s second step when it finds, “at the end of its interpretive work,” that “Congress has left an ambiguity or gap.” Post , at 1–2. (The Government offers a similar test. See Brief for Respondents in No. 22–1219, pp. 7, 10, 14; Tr. of Oral Arg. 113–114, 116.) That is no guide at all. Once more, the basic nature and meaning of a statute does not change when an agency happens to be involved. Nor does it change just because the agency has happened to offer its interpretation through the sort of procedures necessary to obtain deference, or because the other preconditions for Chevron happen to be satisfied. The statute still has a best meaning, necessarily discernible by a court deploying its full interpretive toolkit. So for the dissent’s test to have any meaning, it must think that in an agency case (unlike in any other), a court should give up on its “interpretive work” before it has identified that best meaning. But how does a court know when to do so? On that point, the dissent leaves a gap of its own. It protests only that some other interpretive tools—all with pedigrees more robust than Chevron ’s, and all designed to help courts identify the meaning of a text rather than allow the Executive Branch to displace it—also apply to ambiguous texts. See post , at 27. That this is all the dissent can come up with, after four decades of judicial experience attempting to identify ambiguity under Chevron , reveals the futility of the  exercise. 8

 Because Chevron in its original, two-step form was so indeterminate and sweeping, we have instead been forced to clarify the doctrine again and again. Our attempts to do so have only added to Chevron ’s unworkability, transforming the original two-step into a dizzying breakdance. See Adams Fruit Co. , 494 U. S., at 649–650; Mead , 533 U. S., at 226–227; King , 576 U. S., at 486; Encino Motorcars , 579 U. S., at 220; Epic Systems , 584 U. S., at 519–520; on and on. And the doctrine continues to spawn difficult threshold questions that promise to further complicate the inquiry should Chevron be retained. See, e . g ., Cargill v. Garland , 57 F. 4th 447, 465–468 (CA5 2023) (plurality opinion) (May the Government waive reliance on Chevron ? Does Chevron apply to agency interpretations of statutes imposing criminal penalties? Does Chevron displace the rule of lenity?), aff ’d, 602 U. S. ___ (2024).

 Four decades after its inception, Chevron has thus become an impediment, rather than an aid, to accomplishing the basic judicial task of “say[ing] what the law is.” Marbury , 1 Cranch, at 177. And its continuing import is far from clear. Courts have often declined to engage with the doctrine, saying it makes no difference. See n. 7, supra . And as noted, we have avoided deferring under Chevron since 2016. That trend is nothing new; for decades, we have often declined to invoke Chevron even in those cases where it might appear to be applicable. See W. Eskridge & L. Baer, The Continuum of Deference: Supreme Court Treatment of Agency Statutory Interpretations From Chevron to Hamdan , 96 Geo. L. J. 1083, 1125 (2008). At this point, all  that remains of Chevron is a decaying husk with bold pretensions.

 Nor has Chevron been the sort of “ ‘stable background’ rule” that fosters meaningful reliance. Post , at 8, n. 1 (opinion of Kagan, J. ) (quoting Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. , 561 U. S. 247 , 261 (2010)). Given our constant tinkering with and eventual turn away from Chevron , and its inconsistent application by the lower courts, it instead is hard to see how anyone—Congress included—could reasonably expect a court to rely on Chevron in any particular case. And even if it were possible to predict accurately when courts will apply Chevron , the doctrine “does not provide ‘a clear or easily applicable standard, so arguments for reliance based on its clarity are misplaced.’ ” Janus , 585 U. S., at 927 (quoting South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. , 585 U. S. 162 , 186 (2018)). To plan on Chevron yielding a particular result is to gamble not only that the doctrine will be invoked, but also that it will produce readily foreseeable outcomes and the stability that comes with them. History has proved neither bet to be a winning proposition.

 Rather than safeguarding reliance interests, Chevron affirmatively destroys them. Under Chevron , a statutory ambiguity, no matter why it is there, becomes a license authorizing an agency to change positions as much as it likes, with “[u]nexplained inconsistency” being “at most . . . a reason for holding an interpretation to be . . . arbitrary and capricious.” Brand X , 545 U. S., at 981. But statutory ambiguity, as we have explained, is not a reliable indicator of actual delegation of discretionary authority to agencies. Chevron thus allows agencies to change course even when Congress has given them no power to do so. By its sheer breadth, Chevron fosters unwarranted instability in the law, leaving those attempting to plan around agency action in an eternal fog of uncertainty.

 Chevron accordingly has undermined the very “rule of law” values that stare decisis exists to secure. Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community , 572 U. S. 782 , 798 (2014). And it cannot be constrained by admonishing courts to be extra careful, or by tacking on a new batch of conditions. We would need to once again “revis[e] its theoretical basis . . . in order to cure its practical deficiencies.” Montejo v. Louisiana , 556 U. S. 778 , 792 (2009). Stare decisis does not require us to do so, especially because any refinements we might make would only point courts back to their duties under the APA to “decide all relevant questions of law” and “interpret . . . statutory provisions.” §706. Nor is there any reason to wait helplessly for Congress to correct our mistake. The Court has jettisoned many precedents that Congress likewise could have legislatively overruled. See, e.g. , Patterson v. McLean Credit Union , 485 U. S. 617 , 618 (1988) ( per curiam ) (collecting cases). And part of “judicial humility,” post , at 3, 25 (opinion of Kagan , J.,), is admitting and in certain cases correcting our own mistakes, especially when those mistakes are serious, see post , at 8–9 (opinion of Gorsuch , J.).

 This is one of those cases. Chevron was a judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties. And the only way to “ensure that the law will not merely change erratically, but will develop in a principled and intelligible fashion,” Vasquez v. Hillery , 474 U. S. 254 , 265 (1986), is for us to leave Chevron behind.

 By doing so, however, we do not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework. The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions are lawful—including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself—are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite our change in interpretive methodology. See CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries , 553 U. S. 442 , 457 (2008). Mere reliance on Chevron cannot constitute a “ ‘special justification’ ” for overruling such a holding, because to say a precedent relied on Chevron is, at best, “just an argument that the precedent was wrongly decided.” Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc. , 573 U. S. 258 , 266 (2014) (quoting Dickerson v. United States , 530 U. S. 428 , 443 (2000)). That is not enough to justify overruling a statutory precedent.

 The dissent ends by quoting Chevron : “ ‘Judges are not experts in the field.’ ” Post , at 31 (quoting 467 U. S., at 865). That depends, of course, on what the “field” is. If it is legal interpretation, that has been, “emphatically,” “the province and duty of the judicial department” for at least 221 years. Marbury , 1 Cranch, at 177. The rest of the dissent’s selected epigraph is that judges “ ‘are not part of either political branch.’ ” Post , at 31 (quoting Chevron , 467 U. S., at 865). Indeed. Judges have always been expected to apply their “judgment” independent of the political branches when interpreting the laws those branches enact. The Federalist No. 78, at 523. And one of those laws, the APA, bars judges from disregarding that responsibility just because an Executive Branch agency views a statute differently.

 Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA requires. Careful attention to the judgment of the Executive Branch may help inform that inquiry. And when a particular statute delegates authority to an agency consistent with constitutional limits, courts must respect the delegation, while ensuring that the agency acts within it. But courts need not and under the APA may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.

 Because the D. C. and First Circuits relied on Chevron in deciding whether to uphold the Rule, their judgments are vacated, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

It is so ordered.

1  For any landlubbers, “F/V” is simply the designation for a fishing vessel.

2  Both petitions also presented questions regarding the consistency of the Rule with the MSA. See Pet. for Cert. in No. 22–451, p. i; Pet. for Cert. in No. 22–1219, p. ii. We did not grant certiorari with respect to those questions and thus do not reach them.

3  The dissent plucks out Gray , Hearst , and—to “gild the lily,” in its telling—three more 1940s decisions, claiming they reflect the relevant historical tradition of judicial review. Post , at 21–22, and n. 6 (opinion of Kagan , J.). But it has no substantial response to the fact that Gray and Hearst themselves endorsed, implicitly in one case and explicitly in the next, the traditional rule that “questions of statutory interpretation . . . are for the courts to resolve, giving appropriate weight”—not outright deference—“to the judgment of those whose special duty is to administer the questioned statute.” Hearst , 322 U. S., at 130–131. And it fails to recognize the deep roots that this rule has in our Nation’s judicial tradition, to the limited extent it engages with that tradition at all. See post , at 20–21, n. 5. Instead, like the Government, it strains to equate the “respect” or “weight” traditionally afforded to Executive Branch interpretations with binding deference. See ibid. ; Brief for Respondents in No. 22–1219, pp. 21–24. That supposed equivalence is a fiction. The dissent’s cases establish that a “ contemporaneous construction” shared by “not only . . . the courts” but also “the departments” could be “controlling,” Schell’s Executors v. Fauché , 138 U. S. 562 , 572 (1891) (emphasis added), and that courts might “lean in favor” of a “contemporaneous” and “continued” construction of the Executive Branch as strong evidence of a statute’s meaning, United States v. Alabama Great Southern R. Co. , 142 U. S. 615 , 621 (1892). They do not establish that Executive Branch interpretations of ambiguous statutes—no matter how inconsistent, late breaking, or flawed—always bound the courts. In reality, a judge was never “bound to adopt the construction given by the head of a department.” Decatur v. Paulding , 14 Pet. 497, 515 (1840).

4  The dissent observes that Section 706 does not say expressly that courts are to decide legal questions using “a de novo standard of review.” Post , at 16. That much is true. But statutes can be sensibly understood only “by reviewing text in context.” Pulsifer v. United States , 601 U. S. 124 , 133 (2024). Since the start of our Republic, courts have “decide[d] . . . questions of law” and “interpret[ed] constitutional and statutory provisions” by applying their own legal judgment. §706. Setting aside its misplaced reliance on Gray and Hearst , the dissent does not and could not deny that tradition. But it nonetheless insists that to codify that tradition, Congress needed to expressly reject a sort of deference the courts had never before applied—and would not apply for several decades to come. It did not. “The notion that some things ‘go without saying’ applies to legislation just as it does to everyday life.” Bond v. United States , 572 U. S. 844 , 857 (2014).

5  See, e.g. , 29 U. S. C. §213(a)(15) (exempting from provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act “any employee employed on a casual basis in domestic service employment to provide companionship services for individuals who (because of age or infirmity) are unable to care for themselves ( as such terms are defined and delimited by regulations of the Secretary )” (emphasis added)); 42 U. S. C. §5846(a)(2) (requiring notification to Nuclear Regulatory Commission when a facility or activity licensed or regulated pursuant to the Atomic Energy Act “contains a defect which could create a substantial safety hazard, as defined by regulations which the Commission shall promulgate ” (emphasis added)).

6  See, e.g. , 33 U. S. C. §1312(a) (requiring establishment of effluent limitations “[w]henever, in the judgment of the [Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)] Administrator . . . , discharges of pollutants from a point source or group of point sources . . . would interfere with the attainment or maintenance of that water quality . . . which shall assure” various outcomes, such as the “protection of public health” and “public water supplies”); 42 U. S. C. §7412(n)(1)(A) (directing EPA to regulate power plants “if the Administrator finds such regulation is appropriate and necessary”).

7  See, e . g ., Guedes v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives , 45 F. 4th 306, 313–314 (CADC 2022), abrogated by Garland v. Cargill , 602 U. S. ___ (2024); County of Amador v. United States Dept. of Interior , 872 F. 3d 1012 , 1021–1022 (CA9 2017); Estrada-Rodriguez v. Lynch , 825 F. 3d 397 , 403–404 (CA8 2016); Nielsen v. AECOM Tech. Corp. , 762 F. 3d 214 , 220 (CA2 2014); Alaska Stock, LLC v. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. , 747 F. 3d 673 , 685, n. 52 (CA9 2014); Jurado-Delgado v. Attorney Gen. of U. S. , 498 Fed. Appx. 107, 117 (CA3 2009); see also D. Brookins, Confusion in the Circuit Courts: How the Circuit Courts Are Solving the Mead -Puzzle by Avoiding It Altogether, 85 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1484, 1496–1499 (2017) (documenting Chevron avoidance by the lower courts); A. Vermeule, Our Schmittian Administrative Law, 122 Harv. L. Rev. 1095, 1127–1129 (2009) (same); L. Bressman, How Mead Has Muddled Judicial Review of Agency Action, 58 Vand. L. Rev. 1443, 1464–1466 (2005) (same).

8  Citing an empirical study, the dissent adds that Chevron “fosters agreement among judges.” Post , at 28. It is hardly surprising that a study might find as much; Chevron ’s second step is supposed to be hospitable to agency interpretations. So when judges get there, they tend to agree that the agency wins. That proves nothing about the supposed ease or predictability of identifying ambiguity in the first place.

Concurrence

 Justice Thomas , concurring.

 I join the Court’s opinion in full because it correctly concludes that Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. , 467 U. S. 837 (1984) , must finally be overruled. Under Chevron , a judge was required to adopt an agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute, so long as the agency had a “permissible construction of the statute.” See id. , at 843. As the Court explains, that deference does not comport with the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires judges to decide “all relevant questions of law” and “interpret constitutional and statutory provisions” when reviewing an agency action. 5 U. S. C. §706 ; see also ante, at 18–23; Baldwin v. United States , 589 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2020) ( Thomas, J. , dissenting from denial of certiorari) (slip op., at 4–5).

  I write separately to underscore a more fundamental problem: Chevron deference also violates our Constitution’s separation of powers, as I have previously explained at length. See Baldwin , 589 U. S., at ___–___ (dissenting opinion) (slip op., at 2–4); Michigan v. EPA , 576 U. S. 743 , 761–763 (2015) (concurring opinion); see also Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Assn. , 575 U. S. 92 , 115–118 (2015) (opinion concurring in judgment). And, I agree with Justice Gorsuch that we should not overlook Chevron ’s constitutional defects in overruling it. 1 * Post , at 15–20 (concurring opinion). To provide “practical and real protections for individual liberty,” the Framers drafted a Constitution that divides the legislative, executive, and judicial powers between three branches of Government. Perez , 575 U. S., at 118 (opinion of Thomas, J. ). Chevron deference compromises this separation of powers in two ways. It curbs the judicial power afforded to courts, and simultaneously expands agencies’ executive power beyond constitutional limits.

  Chevron compels judges to abdicate their Article III “judicial Power.” §1. “[T]he judicial power, as originally understood, requires a court to exercise its independent judgment in interpreting and expounding upon the laws.” Perez , 575 U. S., at 119 (opinion of Thomas, J. ); accord, post , at 17–18 (opinion of Gorsuch, J. ). The Framers understood that “legal texts . . . often contain ambiguities,” and that the judicial power included “the power to resolve these ambiguities over time.” Perez , 575 U. S., at 119 (opinion of Thomas, J. ); accord, ante, at 7–9. But, under Chevron , a judge must accept an agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous law, even if he thinks another interpretation is correct. Ante , at 19. Chevron deference thus prevents judges from  exercising their independent judgment to resolve ambiguities. Baldwin , 589 U. S., at ___ (opinion of Thomas, J. ) (slip op., at 3); see also Michigan , 576 U. S., at 761 (opinion of Thomas, J. ); see also Perez , 575 U. S., at 123 (opinion of Thomas, J. ). By tying a judge’s hands, Chevron prevents the Judiciary from serving as a constitutional check on the Executive. It allows “the Executive . . . to dictate the outcome of cases through erroneous interpretations.” Baldwin , 589 U. S., at ___ (opinion of Thomas, J. ) (slip op., at 4); Michigan , 576 U. S., at 763, n. 1 (opinion of Thomas, J. ); see also Perez , 575 U. S., at 124 (opinion of Thomas, J. ). Because the judicial power requires judges to exercise their independent judgment, the deference that Chevron requires contravenes Article III’s mandate.

  Chevron deference also permits the Executive Branch to exercise powers not given to it. “When the Government is called upon to perform a function that requires an exercise of legislative, executive, or judicial power, only the vested recipient of that power can perform it.” Department of Transportation v. Association of American Railroads , 575 U. S. 43 , 68 (2015) ( Thomas, J. , concurring in judgment). Because the Constitution gives the Executive Branch only “[t]he executive Power,” executive agencies may constitutionally exercise only that power. Art. II, §1, cl. 1. But, Chevron gives agencies license to exercise judicial power. By allowing agencies to definitively interpret laws so long as they are ambiguous, Chevron “transfer[s]” the Judiciary’s “interpretive judgment to the agency.” Perez , 575 U. S., at 124 (opinion of Thomas, J. ); see also Baldwin , 589 U. S., at ___ (opinion of Thomas, J. ) (slip op., at 4); Michigan , 576 U. S., at 761–762 (opinion of Thomas, J. ); post , at 18 ( Gorsuch, J. , concurring).

  Chevron deference “cannot be salvaged” by recasting it as deference to an agency’s “formulation of policy.” Baldwin , 589 U. S., at ___ (opinion of Thomas, J. ) (internal quotation marks omitted) (slip op., at 3). If that were true, Chevron  would mean that “agencies are unconstitutionally exercising ‘legislative Powers’ vested in Congress.” Baldwin , 589 U. S., at ___ (opinion of Thomas , J.) (slip op., at 3) (quoting Art. I, §1). By “giv[ing] the force of law to agency pronouncements on matters of private conduct as to which Congress did not actually have an intent,” Chevron “permit[s] a body other than Congress to perform a function that requires an exercise of legislative power.” Michigan , 576 U. S., at 762 (opinion of Thomas, J. ) (internal quotation marks omitted). No matter the gloss put on it, Chevron expands agencies’ power beyond the bounds of Article II by permitting them to exercise powers reserved to another branch of Government.

  Chevron deference was “not a harmless transfer of power.” Baldwin , 589 U. S., at ___ (opinion of Thomas, J. ) (slip op., at 3). “The Constitution carefully imposes structural constraints on all three branches, and the exercise of power free of those accompanying restraints subverts the design of the Constitution’s ratifiers.” Ibid . In particular, the Founders envisioned that “the courts [would] check the Executive by applying the correct interpretation of the law.” Id ., at ___ (slip op., at 4). Chevron was thus a fundamental disruption of our separation of powers. It improperly strips courts of judicial power by simultaneously increasing the power of executive agencies. By overruling Chevron , we restore this aspect of our separation of powers. To safeguard individual liberty, “[s]tructure is everything.” A. Scalia, Foreword: The Importance of Structure in Constitutional Interpretation, 83 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1417, 1418 (2008). Although the Court finally ends our 40-year misadventure with Chevron deference, its more profound problems should not be overlooked. Regardless of what a statute says, the type of deference required by Chevron violates the Constitution.

1 *There is much to be commended in Justice Gorsuch ’s careful consideration from first principles of the weight we should afford to our precedent. I agree with the lion’s share of his concurrence. See generally Gamble v. United States , 587 U. S. 678 , 710 (2019) ( Thomas, J. , concurring).

 Justice Gorsuch , concurring.

 In disputes between individuals and the government about the meaning of a federal law, federal courts have traditionally sought to offer independent judgments about “what the law is” without favor to either side. Marbury v. Madison , 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803). Beginning in the mid-1980s, however, this Court experimented with a radically different approach. Applying Chevron deference, judges began deferring to the views of executive agency officials about the meaning of federal statutes. See Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. , 467 U. S. 837 (1984) . With time, the error of this approach became widely appreciated. So much so that this Court has refused to apply Chevron deference since 2016. Today, the Court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss. In doing  so, the Court returns judges to interpretive rules that have guided federal courts since the Nation’s founding. I write separately to address why the proper application of the doctrine of stare decisis supports that course.

 Today, the phrase “common law judge” may call to mind a judicial titan of the past who brilliantly devised new legal rules on his own. The phrase “ stare decisis ” might conjure up a sense that judges who come later in time are strictly bound to follow the work of their predecessors. But neither of those intuitions fairly describes the traditional common-law understanding of the judge’s role or the doctrine of stare decisis .

 At common law, a judge’s charge to decide cases was not usually understood as a license to make new law. For much of England’s early history, different rulers and different legal systems prevailed in different regions. As England consolidated into a single kingdom governed by a single legal system, the judge’s task was to examine those pre-existing legal traditions and apply in the disputes that came to him those legal rules that were “common to the whole land and to all Englishmen.” F. Maitland, Equity, Also the Forms of Action at Common Law 2 (1929). That was “common law” judging.

 This view of the judge’s role had consequences for the authority due judicial decisions. Because a judge’s job was to find and apply the law, not make it, the “opinion of the judge” and “the law” were not considered “one and the same thing.” 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 71 (1765) (Blackstone) (emphasis deleted). A judge’s decision might bind the parties to the case at hand. M. Hale, The History and Analysis of the Common Law of England 68 (1713) (Hale). But none of that meant the judge had the power to “make a Law properly so called” for society  at large, “for that only the King and Parliament can do.” Ibid.

 Other consequences followed for the role precedent played in future judicial proceedings. Because past decisions represented something “less than a Law,” they did not bind future judges. Ibid. At the same time, as Matthew Hale put it, a future judge could give a past decision “Weight” as “Evidence” of the law. Ibid. Expressing the same idea, William Blackstone conceived of judicial precedents as “evidence” of “the common law.” 1 Blackstone 69, 71. And much like other forms of evidence, precedents at common law were thought to vary in the weight due them. Some past decisions might supply future courts with considerable guidance. But others might be entitled to lesser weight, not least because judges are no less prone to error than anyone else and they may sometimes “mistake” what the law demands. Id. , at 71 (emphasis deleted). In cases like that, both men thought, a future judge should not rotely repeat a past mistake but instead “vindicate” the law “from misrepresentation.” Id ., at 70 .

 When examining past decisions as evidence of the law, common law judges did not, broadly speaking, afford overwhelming weight to any “single precedent.” J. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History 209–210 (5th ed. 2019). Instead, a prior decision’s persuasive force depended in large measure on its “Consonancy and Congruity with Resolutions and Decisions of former Times.” Hale 68. An individual decision might reflect the views of one court at one moment in time, but a consistent line of decisions representing the wisdom of many minds across many generations was generally considered stronger evidence of the law’s meaning. Ibid.

 With this conception of precedent in mind, Lord Mansfield cautioned against elevating “particular cases” above the “general principles” that “run through the cases, and govern the decision of them.” Rust v. Cooper , 2 Cowp. 629,  632, 98 Eng. Rep. 1277, 1279 (K. B. 1777). By discarding aberrational rulings and pursuing instead the mainstream of past decisions, he observed, the common law tended over time to “wor[k] itself pure.” Omychund v. Barker , 1 Atk. 22, 33, 26 Eng. Rep. 15, 23 (Ch. 1744) (emphasis deleted). Reflecting similar thinking, Edmund Burke offered five principles for the evaluation of past judicial decisions: “They ought to be shewn; first, to be numerous and not scattered here and there;—secondly, concurrent and not contradictory and mutually destructive;—thirdly, to be made in good and constitutional times;—fourthly, not to be made to serve an occasion;—and fifthly, to be agreeable to the general tenor of legal principles.” Speech of Dec. 23, 1790, in 3 The Speeches of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke 513 (1816).

 Not only did different decisions carry different weight, so did different language within a decision. An opinion’s holding and the reasoning essential to it (the ratio decidendi ) merited careful attention. Dicta, stray remarks, and digressions warranted less weight. See N. Duxbury, The Intricacies of Dicta and Dissent 19–24 (2021) (Duxbury). These were no more than “the vapours and fumes of law.” F. Bacon, The Lord Keeper’s Speech in the Exchequer (1617), in 2 The Works of Francis Bacon 478 (B. Montagu ed. 1887) (Bacon).

 That is not to say those “vapours” were worthless. Often dicta might provide the parties to a particular dispute a “fuller understanding of the court’s decisional path or related areas of concern.” B. Garner et al., The Law of Judicial Precedent 65 (2016) (Precedent). Dicta might also provide future courts with a source of “thoughtful advice.” Ibid. But future courts had to be careful not to treat every “hasty expression . . . as a serious and deliberate opinion.” Steel v. Houghton , 1 Bl. H. 51, 53, 126 Eng. Rep. 32, 33 (C. P. 1788). To do so would work an “injustice to [the] memory” of their predecessors who could not expect judicial  remarks issued in one context to apply perfectly in others, perhaps especially ones they could not foresee. Ibid. Also, the limits of the adversarial process, a distinctive feature of English law, had to be borne in mind. When a single judge or a small panel reached a decision in a case, they did so based on the factual record and legal arguments the parties at hand have chosen to develop. Attuned to those constraints, future judges had to proceed with an open mind to the possibility that different facts and different legal arguments might dictate different outcomes in later disputes. See Duxbury 19–24.

 Necessarily, this represents just a quick sketch of traditional common-law understandings of the judge’s role and the place of precedent in it. It focuses, too, on the horizontal, not vertical, force of judicial precedents. But there are good reasons to think that the common law’s understandings of judges and precedent outlined above crossed the Atlantic and informed the nature of the “judicial Power” the Constitution vests in federal courts. Art. III, §1.

 Not only was the Constitution adopted against the backdrop of these understandings and, in light of that alone, they may provide evidence of what the framers meant when they spoke of the “judicial Power.” Many other, more specific provisions in the Constitution reflect much the same distinction between lawmaking and lawfinding functions the common law did. The Constitution provides that its terms may be amended only through certain prescribed democratic processes. Art. V. It vests the power to enact federal legislation exclusively in the people’s elected representatives in Congress. Art. I, §1. Meanwhile, the Constitution describes the judicial power as the power to resolve cases and controversies. Art. III, §2, cl. 1. As well, it delegates that authority to life-tenured judges, see §1, an assignment that would have made little sense if judges could  usurp lawmaking powers vested in periodically elected representatives. But one that makes perfect sense if what is sought is a neutral party “to interpret and apply” the law without fear or favor in a dispute between others. 2 The Works of James Wilson 161 (J. Andrews ed. 1896) (Wilson); see Osborn v. Bank of United States , 9 Wheat. 738, 866 (1824).

 The constrained view of the judicial power that runs through our Constitution carries with it familiar implications, ones the framers readily acknowledged. James Madison, for example, proclaimed that it would be a “fallacy” to suggest that judges or their precedents could “repeal or alter” the Constitution or the laws of the United States. Letter to N. Trist (Dec. 1831), in 9 The Writings of James Madison 477 (G. Hunt ed. 1910). A court’s opinion, James Wilson added, may be thought of as “effective la[w]” “[a]s to the parties.” Wilson 160–161. But as in England, Wilson said, a prior judicial decision could serve in a future dispute only as “evidence” of the law’s proper construction. Id ., at 160; accord, 1 J. Kent, Commentaries on American Law 442–443 (1826).

 The framers also recognized that the judicial power described in our Constitution implies, as the judicial power did in England, a power (and duty) of discrimination when it comes to assessing the “evidence” embodied in past decisions. So, for example, Madison observed that judicial rulings “ repeatedly confirmed  ” may supply better evidence of the law’s meaning than isolated or aberrant ones. Letter to C. Ingersoll (June 1831), in 4 Letters and Other Writings of James Madison 184 (1867) (emphasis added). Extending the thought, Thomas Jefferson believed it would often take “numerous decisions” for the meaning of new statutes to become truly “settled.” Letter to S. Jones (July 1809), in 12 The Writings of Thomas Jefferson 299 (A. Bergh ed. 1907).

 From the start, too, American courts recognized that not everything found in a prior decision was entitled to equal  weight. As Chief Justice Marshall warned, “It is a maxim not to be disregarded, that general expressions, in every opinion, are to be taken in connection with the case in which those expressions are used.” Cohens v. Virginia , 6 Wheat. 264, 399 (1821). To the extent a past court offered views “beyond the case,” those expressions “may be respected” in a later case “but ought not to control the judgment.” Ibid. One “obvious” reason for this, Marshall continued, had to do with the limits of the adversarial process we inherited from England: Only “[t]he question actually before the Court is investigated with care, and considered in its full extent. Other principles which may serve to illustrate it, are considered in their relation to the case decided, but their possible bearing on all other cases is seldom completely investigated.” Id. , at 399–400.

 Abraham Lincoln championed these traditional understandings in his debates with Stephen Douglas. Douglas took the view that a single decision of this Court—no matter how flawed—could definitively resolve a contested issue for everyone and all time. Those who thought otherwise, he said, “aim[ed] a deadly blow to our whole Republican system of government.” Speech at Springfield, Ill. (June 26, 1857), in 2 The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln 401 (R. Basler ed. 1953) (Lincoln Speech). But Lincoln knew better. While accepting that judicial decisions “absolutely determine” the rights of the parties to a court’s judgment, he refused to accept that any single judicial decision could “fully settl[e]” an issue, particularly when that decision departs from the Constitution. Id ., at 400–401. In cases such as these, Lincoln explained, “it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat [the decision] as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country.” Id. , at 401.

 After the Civil War, the Court echoed some of these same points. It stressed that every statement in a judicial opin ion “must be taken in connection with its immediate context,” In re Ayers , 123 U. S. 443 , 488 (1887), and stray “remarks” must not be elevated above the written law, see The Belfast , 7 Wall. 624, 641 (1869); see also, e . g ., Trebilcock v. Wilson , 12 Wall. 687, 692–693 (1872); Mason v. Eldred , 6 Wall. 231, 236–238 (1868). During Chief Justice Chase’s tenure, it seems a Justice writing the Court’s majority opinion would generally work alone and present his work orally and in summary form to his colleagues at conference, which meant that other Justices often did not even review the opinion prior to publication. 6 C. Fairman, History of the Supreme Court of the United States 69–70 (1971). The Court could proceed in this way because it understood that a single judicial opinion may resolve a “case or controversy,” and in so doing it may make “effective law” for the parties, but it does not legislate for the whole of the country and is not to be confused with laws that do.

 From all this, I see at least three lessons about the doctrine of stare decisis relevant to the decision before us today. Each concerns a form of judicial humility.

  First , a past decision may bind the parties to a dispute, but it provides this Court no authority in future cases to depart from what the Constitution or laws of the United States ordain. Instead, the Constitution promises, the American people are sovereign and they alone may, through democratically responsive processes, amend our foundational charter or revise federal legislation. Unelected judges enjoy no such power. Part I–B, supra .

 Recognizing as much, this Court has often said that stare decisis is not an “ ‘inexorable command.’ ” State Oil Co. v. Khan , 522 U. S. 3 , 20 (1997). And from time to time it has found it necessary to correct its past mistakes. When it comes to correcting errors of constitutional interpretation, the Court has stressed the importance of doing so, for they  can be corrected otherwise only through the amendment process. See, e.g. , Franchise Tax Bd. of Cal. v. Hyatt , 587 U. S. 230 , 248 (2019). When it comes to fixing errors of statutory interpretation, the Court has proceeded perhaps more circumspectly. But in that field, too, it has overruled even longstanding but “flawed” decisions. See, e.g. , Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v. PSKS, Inc. , 551 U. S. 877 , 904, 907 (2007).

 Recent history illustrates all this. During the tenures of Chief Justices Warren and Burger, it seems this Court overruled an average of around three cases per Term, including roughly 50 statutory precedents between the 1960s and 1980s alone. See W. Eskridge, Overruling Statutory Precedents, 76 Geo. L. J. 1361, 1427–1434 (1988) (collecting cases). Many of these decisions came in settings no less consequential than today’s. In recent years, we have not approached the pace set by our predecessors, overruling an average of just one or two prior decisions each Term. 1 But the point remains: Judicial decisions inconsistent with the written law do not inexorably control.

  Second , another lesson tempers the first. While judicial decisions may not supersede or revise the Constitution or federal statutory law, they merit our “respect as embodying the considered views of those who have come before.” Ramos v. Louisiana , 590 U. S. 83 , 105 (2020). As a matter of professional responsibility, a judge must not only avoid confusing his writings with the law. When a case comes before him, he must also weigh his view of what the law demands against the thoughtful views of his predecessors. After all, “[p]recedent is a way of accumulating and passing down the learning of past generations, a font of established wisdom  richer than what can be found in any single judge or panel of judges.” Precedent 9.

 Doubtless, past judicial decisions may, as they always have, command “greater or less authority as precedents, according to circumstances.” Lincoln Speech 401. But, like English judges before us, we have long turned to familiar considerations to guide our assessment of the weight due a past decision. So, for example, as this Court has put it, the weight due a precedent may depend on the quality of its reasoning, its consistency with related decisions, its workability, and reliance interests that have formed around it. See Ramos , 590 U. S., at 106. The first factor recognizes that the primary power of any precedent lies in its power to persuade—and poorly reasoned decisions may not provide reliable evidence of the law’s meaning. The second factor reflects the fact that a precedent is more likely to be correct and worthy of respect when it reflects the time-tested wisdom of generations than when it sits “unmoored” from surrounding law. Ibid. The remaining factors, like workability and reliance, do not often supply reason enough on their own to abide a flawed decision, for almost any past decision is likely to benefit some group eager to keep things as they are and content with how things work. See, e.g. , id ., at 108. But these factors can sometimes serve functions similar to the others, by pointing to clues that may suggest a past decision is right in ways not immediately obvious to the individual judge.

 When asking whether to follow or depart from a precedent, some judges deploy adverbs. They speak of whether or not a precedent qualifies as “demonstrably erroneous,” Gamble v. United States , 587 U. S. 678 , 711 (2019) ( Thomas, J. , concurring), or “egregiously wrong,” Ramos , 590 U. S., at 121 ( Kavanaugh, J. , concurring in part). But the emphasis the adverb imparts is not meant for dramatic effect. It seeks to serve instead as a reminder of a more substantive lesson. The lesson that, in assessing the weight  due a past decision, a judge is not to be guided by his own impression alone, but must self-consciously test his views against those who have come before, open to the possibility that a precedent might be correct in ways not initially apparent to him.

  Third , it would be a mistake to read judicial opinions like statutes. Adopted through a robust and democratic process, statutes often apply in all their particulars to all persons. By contrast, when judges reach a decision in our adversarial system, they render a judgment based only on the factual record and legal arguments the parties at hand have chosen to develop. A later court assessing a past decision must therefore appreciate the possibility that different facts and different legal arguments may dictate a different outcome. They must appreciate, too, that, like anyone else, judges are “innately digressive,” and their opinions may sometimes offer stray asides about a wider topic that may sound nearly like legislative commands. Duxbury 4. Often, enterprising counsel seek to exploit such statements to maximum effect. See id ., at 25. But while these digressions may sometimes contain valuable counsel, they remain “vapours and fumes of law,” Bacon 478, and cannot “control the judgment in a subsequent suit,” Cohens , 6 Wheat., at 399.

 These principles, too, have long guided this Court and others. As Judge Easterbrook has put it, an “opinion is not a comprehensive code; it is just an explanation for the Court’s disposition. Judicial opinions must not be confused with statutes, and general expressions must be read in light of the subject under consideration.” United States v. Skoien , 614 F. 3d 638 , 640 (CA7 2010) (en banc); see also Reiter v. Sonotone Corp. , 442 U. S. 330 , 341 (1979) (stressing that an opinion is not “a statute,” and its language should not “be parsed” as if it were); Nevada v. Hicks , 533 U. S. 353 , 372 (2001) (same). If stare decisis counsels respect for the thinking of those who have come before, it also counsels against doing an “injustice to [their] memory” by  overreliance on their every word. Steel , 1 Bl. H., at 53, 126 Eng. Rep., at 33. As judges, “[w]e neither expect nor hope that our successors will comb” through our opinions, searching for delphic answers to matters we never fully explored. Brown v. Davenport , 596 U. S. 118 , 141 (2022). To proceed otherwise risks “turn[ing] stare decisis from a tool of judicial humility into one of judicial hubris.” Ibid.

 Turning now directly to the question what stare decisis effect Chevron deference warrants, each of these lessons seem to me to weigh firmly in favor of the course the Court charts today: Lesson 1, because Chevron deference contravenes the law Congress prescribed in the Administrative Procedure Act. Lesson 2, because Chevron deference runs against mainstream currents in our law regarding the separation of powers, due process, and centuries-old interpretive rules that fortify those constitutional commitments. And Lesson 3, because to hold otherwise would effectively require us to endow stray statements in Chevron with the authority of statutory language, all while ignoring more considered language in that same decision and the teachings of experience.

 Start with Lesson 1. The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (APA) directs a “reviewing court” to “decide all relevant questions of law” and “interpret” relevant “constitutional and statutory provisions.” 5 U. S. C. §706 . When applying Chevron deference, reviewing courts do not interpret all relevant statutory provisions and decide all relevant questions of law. Instead, judges abdicate a large measure of that responsibility in favor of agency officials. Their interpretations of “ambiguous” laws control even when those interpretations are at odds with the fairest reading of the law an independent “reviewing court” can muster. Agency  officials, too, may change their minds about the law’s meaning at any time, even when Congress has not amended the relevant statutory language in any way. National Cable & Telecommunications Assn. v. Brand X Internet Services , 545 U. S. 967 , 982–983 (2005). And those officials may even disagree with and effectively overrule not only their own past interpretations of a law but a court’s past interpretation as well. Ibid. None of that is consistent with the APA’s clear mandate.

 The hard fact is Chevron “did not even bother to cite” the APA, let alone seek to apply its terms. United States v. Mead Corp. , 533 U. S. 218 , 241 (2001) (Scalia, J., dissenting). Instead, as even its most ardent defenders have conceded, Chevron deference rests upon a “ fictionalized statement of legislative desire,” namely, a judicial supposition that Congress implicitly wishes judges to defer to executive agencies’ interpretations of the law even when it has said nothing of the kind. D. Barron & E. Kagan, Chevron’s Nondelegation Doctrine, 2001 S. Ct. Rev. 201, 212 (Kagan) (emphasis added). As proponents see it, that fiction represents a “policy judgmen[t] about what . . . make[s] for good government.” Ibid. 2 But in our democracy unelected judges possess no authority to elevate their own fictions over the laws adopted by the Nation’s elected representatives. Some might think the legal directive Congress provided in the APA unwise; some might think a different arrangement preferable. See, e.g. , post , at 9–11 ( Kagan, J. , dissenting). But it is Congress’s view of “good government,” not ours, that controls.

  Much more could be said about Chevron ’s inconsistency with the APA. But I have said it in the past. See Buffington v. McDonough , 598 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2022) (opinion dissenting from denial of certiorari) (slip op., at 5–6); Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch , 834 F. 3d 1142 , 1151–1153 (CA10 2016) (concurring opinion). And the Court makes many of the same points at length today. See ante , at 18–22. For present purposes, the short of it is that continuing to abide Chevron deference would require us to transgress the first lesson of stare decisis —the humility required of judges to recognize that our decisions must yield to the laws adopted by the people’s elected representatives. 3

 Lesson 2 cannot rescue Chevron deference. If stare decisis calls for judicial humility in the face of the written law, it also cautions us to test our present conclusions carefully against the work of our predecessors. At the same time and as we have seen, this second form of humility counsels us to remember that precedents that have won the endorsement of judges across many generations, demonstrated coherence with our broader law, and weathered the tests of time and experience are entitled to greater consideration than those that have not. See Part I, supra . Viewed by each of these lights, the case for Chevron deference only grows weaker still.

  Start with a look to how our predecessors traditionally understood the judicial role in disputes over a law’s meaning. From the Nation’s founding, they considered “[t]he interpretation of the laws” in cases and controversies “the proper and peculiar province of the courts.” The Federalist No. 78, p. 467 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961) (A. Hamilton). Perhaps the Court’s most famous early decision reflected exactly that view. There, Chief Justice Marshall declared it “emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Marbury , 1 Cranch, at 177. For judges “have neither FORCE nor WILL but merely judgment”—and an obligation to exercise that judgment independently. The Federalist No. 78, at 465. No matter how “disagreeable that duty may be,” this Court has said, a judge “is not at liberty to surrender, or to waive it.” United States v. Dickson , 15 Pet. 141, 162 (1841) (Story, J.). This duty of independent judgment is perhaps “the defining characteristi[c] of Article III judges.” Stern v. Marshall , 564 U. S. 462 , 483 (2011).

 To be sure, this Court has also long extended “great respect” to the “contemporaneous” and consistent views of the coordinate branches about the meaning of a statute’s terms. Edwards’ Lessee v. Darby , 12 Wheat. 206, 210 (1827); see also McCulloch v. Maryland , 4 Wheat. 316, 401 (1819); Stuart v. Laird , 1 Cranch 299, 309 (1803). 4 But traditionally, that did not mean a court had to “defer” to any “reasonable”  construction of an “ambiguous” law that an executive agency might offer. It did not mean that the government could propound a “reasonable” view of the law’s meaning one day, a different one the next, and bind the judiciary always to its latest word. Nor did it mean the executive could displace a pre-existing judicial construction of a statute’s terms, replace it with its own, and effectively overrule a judicial precedent in the process. Put simply, this Court was “not bound” by any and all reasonable “administrative construction[s]” of ambiguous statutes when resolving cases and controversies. Burnet v. Chicago Portrait Co. , 285 U. S. 1 , 16 (1932). While the executive’s consistent and contemporaneous views warranted respect, they “by no means control[led] the action or the opinion of this court in expounding the law with reference to the rights of parties litigant before them.” Irvine v. Marshall , 20 How. 558, 567 (1858); see also A. Bamzai, The Origins of Judicial Deference to Executive Interpretation, 126 Yale L. J. 908, 987 (2017).

 Sensing how jarringly inconsistent Chevron is with this Court’s many longstanding precedents discussing the nature of the judicial role in disputes over the law’s meaning, the government and dissent struggle for a response. The best they can muster is a handful of cases from the early 1940s in which, they say, this Court first “put [deference] principles into action.” Post , at 21 ( Kagan, J. , dissenting). And, admittedly, for a period this Court toyed with a form of deference akin to Chevron , at least for so-called mixed questions of law and fact. See, e.g. , Gray v. Powell , 314 U. S. 402 , 411–412 (1941); NLRB v. Hearst Publications, Inc. , 322 U. S. 111 , 131 (1944). But, as the Court details, even that limited experiment did not last. See ante , at 10–12 . Justice Roberts, in his Gray dissent, decried these decisions for “abdicat[ing our] function as a court of review” and “complete[ly] revers[ing] . . . the normal and usual method of construing a statute.” 314 U. S., at 420–421. And just a few years later, in Skidmore v. Swift & Co. , 323  U. S. 134 (1944), the Court returned to its time-worn path.

 Echoing themes that had run throughout our law from its start, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote for the Court in Skidmore . There, he said, courts may extend respectful consideration to another branch’s interpretation of the law, but the weight due those interpretations must always “depend upon the[ir] thoroughness . . . , the validity of [their] reasoning, [their] consistency with earlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors which give [them] power to persuade.” Id. , at 140. In another case the same year, and again writing for the Court, Justice Jackson expressly rejected a call for a judge-made doctrine of deference much like Chevron , offering that, “[i]f Congress had deemed it necessary or even appropriate” for courts to “defe[r] to administrative construction[,] . . . it would not have been at a loss for words to say so.” Davies Warehouse Co. v. Bowles , 321 U. S. 144 , 156 (1944).

 To the extent proper respect for precedent demands, as it always has, special respect for longstanding and mainstream decisions, Chevron scores badly. It represented not a continuation of a long line of decisions but a break from them. Worse, it did not merely depart from our precedents. More nearly, Chevron defied them.

 Consider next how uneasily Chevron deference sits alongside so many other settled aspects of our law. Having witnessed first-hand King George’s efforts to gain influence and control over colonial judges, see Declaration of Independence ¶ 11, the framers made a considered judgment to build judicial independence into the Constitution’s design. They vested the judicial power in decisionmakers with life tenure. Art. III, §1. They placed the judicial salary beyond political control during a judge’s tenure. Ibid. And they rejected any proposal that would subject judicial decisions to review by political actors. The Federalist No. 81, at 482; United States v. Hansen , 599 U. S. 762 , 786–791 (2023) ( Thomas, J. , concurring). All of this served to ensure the same thing: “A fair trial in a fair tribunal.” In re Murchison , 349 U. S. 133 , 136 (1955). One in which impartial judges, not those currently wielding power in the political branches, would “say what the law is” in cases coming to court. Marbury , 1 Cranch, at 177.

  Chevron deference undermines all that. It precludes courts from exercising the judicial power vested in them by Article III to say what the law is. It forces judges to abandon the best reading of the law in favor of views of those presently holding the reins of the Executive Branch. It requires judges to change, and change again, their interpretations of the law as and when the government demands. And that transfer of power has exactly the sort of consequences one might expect. Rather than insulate adjudication from power and politics to ensure a fair hearing “without respect to persons” as the federal judicial oath demands, 28 U. S. C. §453 , Chevron deference requires courts to “place a finger on the scales of justice in favor of the most powerful of litigants, the federal government.” Buffington , 598 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 9). Along the way, Chevron deference guarantees “systematic bias” in favor of whichever political party currently holds the levers of executive power. P. Hamburger, Chevron Bias, 84 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1187, 1212 (2016).

  Chevron deference undermines other aspects of our settled law, too. In this country, we often boast that the Constitution’s promise of due process of law, see Amdts. 5, 14, means that “ ‘no man can be a judge in his own case.’ ” Williams v. Pennsylvania , 579 U. S. 1 , 8–9 (2016); Calder v. Bull , 3 Dall. 386, 388 (1798) (opinion of Chase, J.). That principle, of course, has even deeper roots, tracing far back into the common law where it was known by the Latin maxim nemo iudex in causa sua . See 1 E. Coke, Institutes  of the Laws of England §212, *141a. Yet, under the Chevron regime, all that means little, for executive agencies may effectively judge the scope of their own lawful powers. See, e.g., Arlington v. FCC , 569 U. S. 290 , 296–297 (2013).

 Traditionally, as well, courts have sought to construe statutes as a reasonable reader would “when the law was made.” Blackstone 59; see United States v. Fisher , 2 Cranch 358, 386 (1805). Today, some call this “textualism.” But really it’s a very old idea, one that constrains judges to a lawfinding rather than lawmaking role by focusing their work on the statutory text, its linguistic context, and various canons of construction. In that way, textualism serves as an essential guardian of the due process promise of fair notice. If a judge could discard an old meaning and assign a new one to a law’s terms, all without any legislative revision, how could people ever be sure of the rules that bind them? New Prime Inc. v. Oliveira , 586 U. S. 105 , 113 (2019). Were the rules otherwise, Blackstone warned, the people would be rendered “slaves to their magistrates.” 4 Blackstone 371.

 Yet, replace “magistrates” with “bureaucrats,” and Blackstone’s fear becomes reality when courts employ Chevron deference. Whenever we confront an ambiguity in the law, judges do not seek to resolve it impartially according to the best evidence of the law’s original meaning. Instead, we resort to a far cruder heuristic: “The reasonable bureaucrat always wins.” And because the reasonable bureaucrat may change his mind year-to-year and election-to-election, the people can never know with certainty what new “interpretations” might be used against them. This “fluid” approach to statutory interpretation is “as much a trap for the innocent as the ancient laws of Caligula,” which were posted so high up on the walls and in print so small that ordinary people could never be sure what they required. United States v. Cardiff , 344 U. S. 174 , 176 (1952).

  The ancient rule of lenity is still another of Chevron ’s victims. Since the founding, American courts have construed ambiguities in penal laws against the government and with lenity toward affected persons. Wooden v. United States , 595 U. S. 360 , 388–390 (2022) ( Gorsuch, J. , concurring in judgment). That principle upholds due process by safeguarding individual liberty in the face of ambiguous laws. Ibid. And it fortifies the separation of powers by keeping the power of punishment firmly “ ‘in the legislative, not in the judicial department.’ ” Id. , at 391 (quoting United States v. Wiltberger , 5 Wheat. 76, 95 (1820)). But power begets power. And pressing Chevron deference as far as it can go, the government has sometimes managed to leverage “ambiguities” in the written law to penalize conduct Congress never clearly proscribed. Compare Guedes v. ATF , 920 F. 3d 1 , 27–28, 31 (CADC 2019), with Garland v. Cargill , 602 U. S. 604 (2024) .

 In all these ways, Chevron ’s fiction has led us to a strange place. One where authorities long thought reserved for Article III are transferred to Article II, where the scales of justice are tilted systematically in favor of the most powerful, where legal demands can change with every election even though the laws do not, and where the people are left to guess about their legal rights and responsibilities. So much tension with so many foundational features of our legal order is surely one more sign that we have “taken a wrong turn along the way.” Kisor v. Wilkie , 588 U. S. 558 , 607 (2019) ( Gorsuch, J., concurring in judgment). 5

 Finally, consider workability and reliance. If, as I have sought to suggest, these factors may sometimes serve as useful proxies for the question whether a precedent comports with the historic tide of judicial practice or represents an aberrational mistake, see Part I–C, supra , they certainly do here.

 Take Chevron ’s “workability.” Throughout its short life, this Court has been forced to supplement and revise Chevron so many times that no one can agree on how many “steps” it requires, nor even what each of those “steps” entails. Some suggest that the analysis begins with “step zero” (perhaps itself a tell), an innovation that traces to United States v. Mead Corp. , 533 U. S. 218 . Mead held that, before even considering whether Chevron applies, a court must determine whether Congress meant to delegate to the agency authority to interpret the law in a given field. 533 U. S., at 226–227. But that exercise faces an immediate challenge: Because Chevron depends on a judicially implied, rather than a legislatively expressed, delegation of interpretive authority to an executive agency, Part II–A, supra , when should the fiction apply and when not? Mead fashioned a multifactor test for judges to use. 533 U. S., at  229–231. But that test has proved as indeterminate in application as it was contrived in origin. Perhaps for these reasons, perhaps for others, this Court has sometimes applied Mead and often ignored it. See Brand X , 545 U. S., at 1014, n. 8 (Scalia, J., dissenting).

 Things do not improve as we move up the Chevron ladder. At “step one,” a judge must defer to an executive official’s interpretation when the statute at hand is “ambiguous.” But even today, Chevron ’s principal beneficiary—the federal government—still cannot say when a statute is sufficiently ambiguous to trigger deference. See, e.g. , Tr. of Oral Arg. in American Hospital Assn. v. Becerra , O. T. 2021, No. 20–1114, pp. 71–72. Perhaps thanks to this particular confusion, the search for ambiguity has devolved into a sort of Snark hunt: Some judges claim to spot it almost everywhere, while other equally fine judges claim never to have seen it. Compare L. Silberman, Chevron —The Intersection of Law & Policy, 58 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 821, 826 (1990), with R. Kethledge, Ambiguities and Agency Cases: Reflections After (Almost) Ten Years on the Bench, 70 Vand. L. Rev. En Banc 315, 323 (2017).

 Nor do courts agree when it comes to “step two.” There, a judge must assess whether an executive agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute is “reasonable.” But what does that inquiry demand? Some courts engage in a comparatively searching review; others almost reflexively defer to an agency’s views. Here again, courts have pursued “wildly different” approaches and reached wildly different conclusions in similar cases. See B. Kavanaugh, Fixing Statutory Interpretation, 129 Harv. L. Rev. 2118, 2152 (2016) (Kavanaugh).

 Today’s cases exemplify some of these problems. We have before us two circuit decisions, three opinions, and at least as many interpretive options on the Chevron menu. On the one hand, we have the D. C. Circuit majority, which deemed the Magnuson-Stevens Act “ambiguous” and upheld the  agency’s regulation as “ ‘permissible.’ ” 45 F. 4th 359, 365 (2022). On the other hand, we have the D. C. Circuit dissent, which argues the statute is “unambiguou[s]” and that it plainly forecloses the agency’s new rule. Id. , at 372 (opinion of Walker, J.). And on yet a third hand, we have the First Circuit, which claimed to have identified “clear textual support” for the regulation, yet refused to say whether it would “classify [its] conclusion as a product of Chevron step one or step two.” 62 F. 4th 621, 631, 634 (2023). As these cases illustrate, Chevron has turned statutory interpretation into a game of bingo under blindfold, with parties guessing at how many boxes there are and which one their case might ultimately fall in.

 Turn now from workability to reliance. Far from engendering reliance interests, the whole point of Chevron deference is to upset them. Under Chevron , executive officials can replace one “reasonable” interpretation with another at any time, all without any change in the law itself. The result: Affected individuals “can never be sure of their legal rights and duties.” Buffington , 598 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 12).

 How bad is the problem? Take just one example. Brand X concerned a law regulating broadband internet services. There, the Court upheld an agency rule adopted by the administration of President George W. Bush because it was premised on a “reasonable” interpretation of the statute. Later, President Barack Obama’s administration rescinded the rule and replaced it with another. Later still, during President Donald J. Trump’s administration, officials replaced that rule with a different one, all before President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s administration declared its intention to reverse course for yet a fourth time. See Safeguarding and Securing the Open Internet, 88 Fed. Reg. 76048 (2023); Brand X , 545 U. S., at 981–982. Each time, the government claimed its new rule was just as “reasonable” as the last. Rather than promoting reliance by fixing the meaning of  the law, Chevron deference engenders constant uncertainty and convulsive change even when the statute at issue itself remains unchanged.

 Nor are these antireliance harms distributed equally. Sophisticated entities and their lawyers may be able to keep pace with rule changes affecting their rights and responsibilities. They may be able to lobby for new “ ‘reasonable’ ” agency interpretations and even capture the agencies that issue them. Buffington , 598 U. S., at ___, ___ (slip op., at 8, 13). But ordinary people can do none of those things. They are the ones who suffer the worst kind of regulatory whiplash Chevron invites.

 Consider a couple of examples. Thomas Buffington, a veteran of the U. S. Air Force, was injured in the line of duty. For a time after he left the Air Force, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) paid disability benefits due him by law. But later the government called on Mr. Buffington to reenter active service. During that period, everyone agreed, the VA could (as it did) suspend his disability payments. After he left active service for a second time, however, the VA turned his patriotism against him. By law, Congress permitted the VA to suspend disability pay only “for any period for which [a servicemember] receives active service pay.” 38 U. S. C. §5304(c) . But the VA had adopted a self-serving regulation requiring veterans to file a form asking for the resumption of their disability pay after a second (or subsequent) stint in active service. 38 CFR §3.654(b)(2) (2021). Unaware of the regulation, Mr. Buffington failed to reapply immediately. When he finally figured out what had happened and reapplied, the VA agreed to resume payments going forward but refused to give Mr. Buffington all of the past disability payments it had withheld. Buffington , 598 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 1–4).

 Mr. Buffington challenged the agency’s action as inconsistent with Congress’s direction that the VA may suspend disability payments only for those periods when a veteran  returns to active service. But armed with Chevron , the agency defeated Mr. Buffington’s claim. Maybe the self-serving regulation the VA cited as justification for its action was not premised on the best reading of the law, courts said, but it represented a “ ‘permissible’ ” one. 598 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 7). In that way, the Executive Branch was able to evade Congress’s promises to someone who took the field repeatedly in the Nation’s defense.

  In another case, one which I heard as a court of appeals judge, De Niz Robles v. Lynch , 803 F. 3d 1165 (CA10 2015), the Board of Immigration Appeals invoked Chevron to overrule a judicial precedent on which many immigrants had relied, see In re Briones , 24 I. & N. Dec. 355, 370 (BIA 2007) (purporting to overrule Padilla–Caldera v. Gonzales , 426 F. 3d 1294 (CA10 2005)). The agency then sought to apply its new interpretation retroactively to punish those immigrants—including Alfonzo De Niz Robles, who had relied on that judicial precedent as authority to remain in this country with his U. S. wife and four children. See 803 F. 3d, at 1168 –1169. Our court ruled that this retrospective application of the BIA’s new interpretation of the law violated Mr. De Niz Robles’s due process rights. Id. , at 1172. But as a lower court, we could treat only the symptom, not the disease. So Chevron permitted the agency going forward to overrule a judicial decision about the best reading of the law with its own different “reasonable” one and in that way deny relief to countless future immigrants.

 Those are just two stories among so many that federal judges could tell (and have told) about what Chevron deference has meant for ordinary people interacting with the federal government. See, e.g. , Lambert v. Saul , 980 F. 3d 1266 , 1268–1276 (CA9 2020); Valent v. Commissioner of Social Security , 918 F. 3d 516 , 525–527 (CA6 2019) (Kethledge, J., dissenting); Gonzalez v. United States Atty. Gen. , 820 F. 3d 399 , 402–405 (CA11 2016) ( per curiam ).

 What does the federal government have to say about this?  It acknowledges that Chevron sits as a heavy weight on the scale in favor of the government, “oppositional” to many “categories of individuals.” Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 22–1219, p. 133 (Relentless Tr.). But, according to the government, Chevron deference is too important an innovation to undo. In its brief reign, the government says, it has become a “fundamenta[l] . . . ground rul[e] for how all three branches of the government are operating together.” Relentless Tr. 102. But, in truth, the Constitution, the APA, and our longstanding precedents set those ground rules some time ago. And under them, agencies cannot invoke a judge-made fiction to unsettle our Nation’s promise to individuals that they are entitled to make their arguments about the law’s demands on them in a fair hearing, one in which they stand on equal footing with the government before an independent judge.

 How could a Court, guided for 200 years by Chief Justice Marshall’s example, come to embrace a counter- Marbury revolution, one at war with the APA, time honored precedents, and so much surrounding law? To answer these questions, turn to Lesson 3 and witness the temptation to endow a stray passage in a judicial decision with extraordinary authority. Call it “power quoting.”

  Chevron was an unlikely place for a revolution to begin. The case concerned the Clean Air Act’s requirement that States regulate “stationary sources” of air pollution in their borders. See 42 U. S. C. §7401 et seq . At the time, it was an open question whether entire industrial plants or their constituent polluting parts counted as “stationary sources.” The Environmental Protection Agency had defined entire plants as sources, an approach that allowed companies to replace individual plant parts without automatically triggering the permitting requirements that apply to new sources. Chevron , 467 U. S., at 840.

  This Court upheld the EPA’s definition as consistent with the governing statute. Id ., at 866. The decision, issued by a bare quorum of the Court, without concurrence or dissent, purported to apply “well-settled principles.” Id ., at 845. “If a court, employing traditional tools of statutory construction, ascertains that Congress had an intention on the precise question at issue,” Chevron provided, then “that intention is the law and must be given effect.” Id ., at 843, n. 9. Many of the cases Chevron cited to support its judgment stood for the traditional proposition that courts afford respectful consideration, not deference, to executive interpretations of the law. See, e.g. , Burnet , 285 U. S., at 16; United States v. Moore , 95 U. S. 760 , 763 (1878). And the decision’s sole citation to legal scholarship was to Roscoe Pound, who long championed de novo judicial review. 467 U. S., at 843, n. 10; see R. Pound, The Place of the Judiciary in a Democratic Polity, 27 A. B. A. J. 133, 136–137 (1941).

 At the same time, of course, the opinion contained bits and pieces that spoke differently. The decision also said that, “if [a] statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to [a] specific issue, the question for the court is whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.” 467 U. S., at 843. But it seems the government didn’t advance this formulation in its brief, so there was no adversarial engagement on it. T. Merrill, The Story of Chevron : The Making of an Accidental Landmark, 66 Admin. L. Rev. 253, 268 (2014) (Merrill). As we have seen, too, the Court did not pause to consider (or even mention) the APA. See Part II–A, supra. It did not discuss contrary precedents issued by the Court since the founding, let alone purport to overrule any of them. See Part II–B–1, supra. Nor did the Court seek to address how its novel rule of deference might be squared with so much surrounding law. See Part II–B–2, supra . As even its defenders have acknowledged, “ Chevron barely bothered to justify its rule of deference, and the few brief passages on this matter pointed in disparate  directions.” Kagan 212–213. “[T]he quality of the reasoning,” they acknowledge, “was not high,” C. Sunstein, Chevron as Law, 107 Geo. L. J. 1613, 1669 (2019).

 If Chevron meant to usher in a revolution in how judges interpret laws, no one appears to have realized it at the time. Chevron ’s author, Justice Stevens, characterized the decision as a “simpl[e] . . . restatement of existing law, nothing more or less.” Merrill 255, 275. In the “19 argued cases” in the following Term “that presented some kind of question about whether the Court should defer to an agency interpretation of statutory law,” this Court cited Chevron just once. Merrill 276. By some accounts, the decision seemed “destined to obscurity.” Ibid .

 It was only three years later when Justice Scalia wrote a concurrence that a revolution began to take shape. Buffington , 598 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 8). There, he argued for a new rule requiring courts to defer to executive agency interpretations of the law whenever a “ ‘statute is silent or ambiguous.’ ” NLRB v. Food & Commercial Workers , 484 U. S. 112 , 133–134 (1987) (opinion of Scalia, J.). Eventually, a majority of the Court followed his lead. Buffington , 598 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 8). But from the start, Justice Scalia made no secret about the scope of his ambitions. See Judicial Deference to Administrative Interpretations of Law, 1989 Duke L. J. 511, 521 (1989) (Scalia). The rule he advocated for represented such a sharp break from prior practice, he explained, that many judges of his day didn’t yet “understand” the “old criteria” were “no longer relevant.” Ibid . Still, he said, overthrowing the past was worth it because a new deferential rule would be “easier to follow.” Ibid.

 Events proved otherwise. As the years wore on and the Court’s new and aggressive reading of Chevron gradually exposed itself as unworkable, unfair, and at odds with our separation of powers, Justice Scalia could have doubled down on the project. But he didn’t. He appreciated that stare decisis is not a rule of “if I thought it yesterday, I must think it tomorrow.” And rather than cling to the pride of personal precedent, the Justice began to express doubts over the very project that he had worked to build. See Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Assn. , 575 U. S. 92 , 109–110 (2015) (opinion concurring in judgment); cf. Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center , 568 U. S. 597 , 617–618, 621 (2013) (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part). If Chevron ’s ascent is a testament to the Justice’s ingenuity, its demise is an even greater tribute to his humility. 6

 Justice Scalia was not alone in his reconsideration. After years spent laboring under Chevron , trying to make sense of it and make it work, Member after Member of this Court came to question the project. See, e.g. , Pereira v. Sessions , 585 U. S. 198 , 219–221 (2018) (Kennedy, J., concurring); Michigan v. EPA , 576 U. S. 743 , 760–764 (2015) ( Thomas , J., concurring); Kisor , 588 U. S., at 591 ( Roberts , C. J., concurring in part); Gutierrez-Brizuela , 834 F. 3d, at 1153 ; Buffington , 598 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 14–15); Kavanaugh 2150–2154. Ultimately, the Court gave up. Despite repeated invitations, it has not applied Chevron deference since 2016. Relentless Tr. 81; App. to Brief for Respondents in No. 22–1219, p. 68a. So an experiment that began only in the mid-1980s effectively ended eight years ago. Along the way, an unusually large number of federal appellate judges voiced their own thoughtful and extensive  criticisms of Chevron . Buffington , 598 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 14–15) (collecting examples). A number of state courts did, too, refusing to import Chevron deference into their own administrative law jurisprudence. See 598 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 15).

 Even if all that and everything else laid out above is true, the government suggests we should retain Chevron deference because judges simply cannot live without it; some statutes are just too “technical” for courts to interpret “intelligently.” Post , at 9, 32 (dissenting opinion). But that objection is no answer to Chevron ’s inconsistency with Congress’s directions in the APA, so much surrounding law, or the challenges its multistep regime have posed in practice. Nor does history counsel such defeatism. Surely, it would be a mistake to suggest our predecessors before Chevron ’s rise in the mid-1980s were unable to make their way intelligently through technical statutory disputes. Following their lead, over the past eight years this Court has managed to resolve even highly complex cases without Chevron deference, and done so even when the government sought deference. Nor, as far as I am aware, did any Member of the Court suggest Chevron deference was necessary to an intelligent resolution of any of those matters. 7 If anything, by affording Chevron deference a period of repose before addressing whether it should be retained, the Court has enabled its Members to test the propriety of that precedent and reflect more deeply on how well it fits into the broader architecture of our law. Others may see things differently, see post , at 26–27 (dissenting opinion), but the caution the  Court has exhibited before overruling Chevron may illustrate one of the reasons why the current Court has been slower to overrule precedents than some of its predecessors, see Part I–C, supra .

 None of this, of course, discharges any Member of this Court from the task of deciding for himself or herself today whether Chevron deference itself warrants deference. But when so many past and current judicial colleagues in this Court and across the country tell us our doctrine is misguided, and when we ourselves managed without Chevron for centuries and manage to do so today, the humility at the core of stare decisis compels us to pause and reflect carefully on the wisdom embodied in that experience. And, in the end, to my mind the lessons of experience counsel wisely against continued reliance on Chevron ’s stray and unconsidered digression. This Court’s opinions fill over 500 volumes, and perhaps “some printed judicial word may be found to support almost any plausible proposition.” R. Jackson, Decisional Law and Stare Decisis, 30 A. B. A. J. 334 (1944). It is not for us to pick and choose passages we happen to like and demand total obedience to them in perpetuity. That would turn stare decisis from a doctrine of humility into a tool for judicial opportunism. Brown , 596 U. S., at 141.

 Proper respect for precedent helps “keep the scale of justice even and steady,” by reinforcing decisional rules consistent with the law upon which all can rely. 1 Blackstone 69. But that respect does not require, nor does it readily tolerate, a steadfast refusal to correct mistakes. As early as 1810, this Court had already overruled one of its cases. See Hudson v. Guestier , 6 Cranch 281, 284 (overruling Rose v. Himely , 4 Cranch 241 (1808)). In recent years, the Court may have overruled precedents less frequently than it did during the Warren and Burger Courts. See Part I–C, supra .  But the job of reconsidering past decisions remains one every Member of this Court faces from time to time. 8

 Justice William O. Douglas served longer on this Court than any other person in the Nation’s history. During his tenure, he observed how a new colleague might be inclined initially to “revere” every word written in an opinion issued before he arrived. W. Douglas, Stare Decisis, 49 Colum. L. Rev. 735, 736 (1949). But, over time, Justice Douglas reflected, his new colleague would “remembe[r] . . . that it is the Constitution which he swore to support and defend, not the gloss which his predecessors may have put on it.” Ibid. And “[s]o he [would] com[e] to formulate his own views, rejecting some earlier ones as false and embracing others.” Ibid. This process of reexamination, Justice Douglas explained, is a “necessary consequence of our system” in which each judge takes an oath—both “personal” and binding—to discern the law’s meaning for himself and apply it faithfully in the cases that come before him. Id. , at 736–737.

 Justice Douglas saw, too, how appeals to precedent could be overstated and sometimes even overwrought. Judges, he reflected, would sometimes first issue “new and startling decision[s],” and then later spin around and “acquire an acute conservatism” in their aggressive defense of “their  new status quo .” Id ., at 737. In that way, even the most novel and unlikely decisions became “coveted anchorage[s],” defended heatedly, if ironically, under the banner of “ stare decisis .” Ibid. ; see also Edwards v. Vannoy , 593 U. S. 255 , 294, n. 7 (2021) ( Gorsuch, J. , concurring).

  That is Chevron ’s story: A revolution masquerading as the status quo. And the defense of it follows the same course Justice Douglas described. Though our dissenting colleagues have not hesitated to question other precedents in the past, they today manifest what Justice Douglas called an “acute conservatism” for Chevron ’s “startling” development, insisting that if this “coveted anchorage” is abandoned the heavens will fall. But the Nation managed to live with busy executive agencies of all sorts long before the Chevron revolution began to take shape in the mid-1980s. And all today’s decision means is that, going forward, federal courts will do exactly as this Court has since 2016, exactly as it did before the mid-1980s, and exactly as it had done since the founding: resolve cases and controversies without any systemic bias in the government’s favor.

 Proper respect for precedent does not begin to suggest otherwise. Instead, it counsels respect for the written law, adherence to consistent teachings over aberrations, and resistance to the temptation of treating our own stray remarks as if they were statutes. And each of those lessons points toward the same conclusion today: Chevron deference is inconsistent with the directions Congress gave us in the APA. It represents a grave anomaly when viewed against the sweep of historic judicial practice. The decision undermines core rule-of-law values ranging from the promise of fair notice to the promise of a fair hearing. Even on its own terms, it has proved unworkable and operated to undermine rather than advance reliance interests, often to the detriment of ordinary Americans. And from the start, the whole project has relied on the overaggressive use of snippets and stray remarks from an opinion that carried  mixed messages. Stare decisis ’s true lesson today is not that we are bound to respect Chevron ’s “startling development,” but bound to inter it.

1  For relevant databases of decisions, see Congressional Research Service, Table of Supreme Court Decisions Overruled by Subsequent Decisions, Constitution Annotated, https://constitution.congress.gov/resources/ decisions-overruled/; see also H. Spaeth et al., 2023 Supreme Court Database, http://supremecourtdatabase.org.

2  See also A. Scalia, Judicial Deference to Administrative Interpretations of Law, 1989 Duke L. J. 511, 516–517 (1989) (describing Chevron ’s theory that Congress “delegat[ed]” interpretive authority to agencies as “fictional”); S. Breyer, Judicial Review of Questions of Law and Policy, 38 Admin. L. Rev. 363, 370 (1986) (describing the notion that there exists a “ ‘legislative intent to delegate the law-interpreting function’ as a kind of legal fiction”).

3  The dissent suggests that we need not take the APA’s directions quite so seriously because the “finest administrative law scholars” from Harvard claim to see in them some wiggle room. Post , at 18 (opinion of Kagan, J .). But nothing in the APA commands deference to the views of professors any more than it does the government. Nor is the dissent’s list of Harvard’s finest administrative law scholars entirely complete. See S. Breyer et al., Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy 288 (7th ed. 2011) (acknowledging that Chevron deference “seems in conflict with . . . the apparently contrary language of 706”); Kagan 212 (likewise acknowledging Chevron deference rests upon a “fictionalized statement of legislative desire”).

4  Accord, National Lead Co. v. United States , 252 U. S. 140 , 145–146 (1920) (affording “great weight” to a “contemporaneous construction” by the executive that had “been long continued”); Jacobs v. Prichard , 223 U. S. 200 , 214 (1912) (“find[ing] no ambiguity in the act” but also finding “strength” for the Court’s interpretation in the executive’s “immediate and continued construction of the act”); Schell’s Executors v. Fauché , 138 U. S. 562 , 572 (1891) (treating as “controlling” a “contemporaneous construction” of a law endorsed “not only [by] the courts but [also by] the departments”).

5  The dissent suggests that Chevron deference bears at least something in common with surrounding law because it resembles a presumption or traditional canon of construction, and both “are common.” Post , at 8, n. 1, 28–29 (opinion of Kagan, J. ). But even that thin reed wavers at a glance. Many of the presumptions and interpretive canons the dissent cites—including lenity, contra proferentem , and others besides—“ ‘embod[y] . . . legal doctrine[s] centuries older than our Republic.’ ” Opati v. Republic of Sudan , 590 U. S. 418 , 425 (2020). Chevron deference can make no such boast. Many of the presumptions and canons the dissent cites also serve the Constitution, protecting the lines of authority it draws. Take just two examples: The federalism canon tells courts to presume federal statutes do not preempt state laws because of the sovereignty States enjoy under the Constitution. Bond v. United States , 572 U. S. 844 , 858 (2014). The presumption against retroactivity serves as guardian of the Constitution’s promise of due process and its ban on ex post facto laws, Landgraf v. USI Film Products , 511 U. S. 244 , 265 (1994). Once more, however, Chevron deference can make no similar claim. Rather than serve the Constitution’s usual rule that litigants are entitled to have an independent judge interpret disputed legal terms, Chevron deference works to undermine that promise. As explored above, too, Chevron deference sits in tension with many traditional legal presumptions and interpretive principles, representing nearly the inverse of the rules of lenity, nemo iudex , and contra proferentem .

6  It should be recalled that, when Justice Scalia launched the Chevron revolution, there were many judges who “abhor[red] . . . ‘plain meaning’ ” and preferred instead to elevate “legislative history” and their own curated accounts of a law’s “purpose[s]” over enacted statutory text. Scalia 515, 521. Chevron , he predicted, would provide a new guardrail against that practice. Scalia 515, 521 . As the Justice’s later writings show, he had the right diagnosis, just the wrong cure. The answer for judges eliding statutory terms is not deference to agencies that may seek to do the same, but a demand that all return to a more faithful adherence to the written law. That was, of course, another project Justice Scalia championed. And as we like to say, “we’re all textualists now.”

7  See, e.g., Becerra v. Empire Health Foundation, for Valley Hospital Medical Center , 597 U. S. 424 , 434 (2022) (resolving intricate Medicare dispute by reference solely to “text,” “context,” and “structure”); see also Sackett v. EPA , 598 U. S. 651 (2023) (same in a complex Clean Water Act dispute); Johnson v. Guzman Chavez , 594 U. S. 523 (2021) (same in technical immigration case).

8  Today’s dissenters are no exceptions. They have voted to overrule precedents that they consider “wrong,” Hurst v. Florida , 577 U. S. 92 , 101 (2016) (opinion for the Court by Sotomayor , J., joined by, inter alios , Kagan , J.); Obergefell v. Hodges , 576 U. S. 644 , 665, 675 (2015) (opinion for the Court, joined by, inter alios , Sotomayor and Kagan , JJ.); that conflict with the Constitution’s “original meaning,” Alleyne v. United States , 570 U. S. 99 , 118 (2013) ( Sotomayor , J., joined by, inter alias , Kagan , J., concurring); and that have proved “unworkable,” Johnson v. United States , 576 U. S. 591 , 605 (2015) (opinion for the Court, joined by, inter alios , Sotomayor and Kagan , JJ.); see also Erlinger v. United States , 602 U. S. ___, ___ (2024) ( Jackson, J. , dissenting) (slip op., at 1) (arguing Apprendi v. New Jersey , 530 U. S. 466 (2000) , and the many cases applying it were all “wrongly decided”).

 Justice Kagan , with whom Justice Sotomayor and Justice Jackson join, 1 * dissenting.

 For 40 years, Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. , 467 U. S. 837 (1984) , has served as a cornerstone of administrative law, allocating responsibility for statutory construction between courts and agencies. Under Chevron , a court uses all its normal interpretive tools to determine whether Congress has spoken to an issue. If the court finds Congress has done so, that is the end of the matter; the agency’s views make no difference. But if the court finds, at the end of its interpretive work, that  Congress has left an ambiguity or gap, then a choice must be made. Who should give content to a statute when Congress’s instructions have run out? Should it be a court? Or should it be the agency Congress has charged with administering the statute? The answer Chevron gives is that it should usually be the agency, within the bounds of reasonableness. That rule has formed the backdrop against which Congress, courts, and agencies—as well as regulated parties and the public—all have operated for decades. It has been applied in thousands of judicial decisions. It has become part of the warp and woof of modern government, supporting regulatory efforts of all kinds—to name a few, keeping air and water clean, food and drugs safe, and financial markets honest.

 And the rule is right. This Court has long understood Chevron deference to reflect what Congress would want, and so to be rooted in a presumption of legislative intent. Congress knows that it does not—in fact cannot—write perfectly complete regulatory statutes. It knows that those statutes will inevitably contain ambiguities that some other actor will have to resolve, and gaps that some other actor will have to fill. And it would usually prefer that actor to be the responsible agency, not a court. Some interpretive issues arising in the regulatory context involve scientific or technical subject matter. Agencies have expertise in those areas; courts do not. Some demand a detailed understanding of complex and interdependent regulatory programs. Agencies know those programs inside-out; again, courts do not. And some present policy choices, including trade-offs between competing goods. Agencies report to a President, who in turn answers to the public for his policy calls; courts have no such accountability and no proper basis for making policy. And of course Congress has conferred on that expert, experienced, and politically accountable agency the authority to administer—to make rules about and otherwise implement—the statute giving rise to the ambiguity or  gap. Put all that together and deference to the agency is the almost obvious choice, based on an implicit congressional delegation of interpretive authority. We defer, the Court has explained, “because of a presumption that Congress” would have “desired the agency (rather than the courts)” to exercise “whatever degree of discretion” the statute allows. Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota), N. A. , 517 U. S. 735 , 740–741 (1996).

 Today, the Court flips the script: It is now “the courts (rather than the agency)” that will wield power when Congress has left an area of interpretive discretion. A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris. In recent years, this Court has too often taken for itself decision-making authority Congress assigned to agencies. The Court has substituted its own judgment on workplace health for that of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; its own judgment on climate change for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its own judgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education. See, e.g. , National Federation of Independent Business v. OSHA , 595 U. S. 109 (2022) ; West Virginia v. EPA , 597 U. S. 697 (2022) ; Biden v. Nebraska , 600 U. S. 477 (2023) . But evidently that was, for this Court, all too piecemeal. In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law. As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar. It defends that move as one (suddenly) required by the (nearly 80-year-old) Administrative Procedure Act. But the Act makes no such demand. Today’s decision is not one Congress directed. It is entirely the majority’s choice.

 And the majority cannot destroy one doctrine of judicial humility without making a laughing-stock of a second. (If opinions had titles, a good candidate for today’s would be Hubris Squared.) Stare decisis is, among other things, a  way to remind judges that wisdom often lies in what prior judges have done. It is a brake on the urge to convert “every new judge’s opinion” into a new legal rule or regime. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , 597 U. S. 215 , 388 (2022) (joint opinion of Breyer, Sotomayor , and Kagan , JJ., dissenting) (quoting 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 69 (7th ed. 1775)). Chevron is entrenched precedent, entitled to the protection of stare decisis , as even the majority acknowledges. In fact, Chevron is entitled to the supercharged version of that doctrine because Congress could always overrule the decision, and because so many governmental and private actors have relied on it for so long. Because that is so, the majority needs a “particularly special justification” for its action. Kisor v. Wilkie , 588 U. S. 558 , 588 (2019) (opinion of the Court). But the majority has nothing that would qualify. It barely tries to advance the usual factors this Court invokes for overruling precedent. Its justification comes down, in the end, to this: Courts must have more say over regulation—over the provision of health care, the protection of the environment, the safety of consumer products, the efficacy of transportation systems, and so on. A longstanding precedent at the crux of administrative governance thus falls victim to a bald assertion of judicial authority. The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.

 Begin with the problem that gave rise to Chevron (and also to its older precursors): The regulatory statutes Congress passes often contain ambiguities and gaps. Sometimes they are intentional. Perhaps Congress “consciously desired” the administering agency to fill in aspects of the legislative scheme, believing that regulatory experts would be “in a better position” than legislators to do so. Chevron , 467 U. S., at 865. Or “perhaps Congress was unable to forge a coalition on either side” of a question, and the contending  parties “decided to take their chances with” the agency’s resolution. Ibid. Sometimes, though, the gaps or ambiguities are what might be thought of as predictable accidents. They may be the result of sloppy drafting, a not infrequent legislative occurrence. Or they may arise from the well-known limits of language or foresight. Accord, ante , at 7, 22. “The subject matter” of a statutory provision may be too “specialized and varying” to “capture in its every detail.” Kisor , 588 U. S., at 566 (plurality opinion). Or the provision may give rise, years or decades down the road, to an issue the enacting Congress could not have anticipated. Whichever the case—whatever the reason—the result is to create uncertainty about some aspect of a provision’s meaning.

 Consider a few examples from the caselaw. They will help show what a typical Chevron question looks like—or really, what a typical Chevron question is . Because when choosing whether to send some class of questions mainly to a court, or mainly to an agency, abstract analysis can only go so far; indeed, it may obscure what matters most. So I begin with the concrete:

Under the Public Health Service Act, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates “biological product[s],” including “protein[s].” 42 U. S. C. §262(i)(1) . When does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as such a “protein”? Must it have a specific, defined sequence of amino acids? See Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. v. FDA , 514 F. Supp. 3d 66, 79–80, 93–106 (DC 2020).

Under the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service must designate endangered “vertebrate fish or wildlife” species, including “distinct population segment[s]” of those species. 16 U. S. C. §1532(16) ; see §1533. What makes one population segment “distinct” from another? Must the Service treat the Washington State population of western gray squirrels as “distinct” 

 because it is geographically separated from other western gray squirrels? Or can the Service take into account that the genetic makeup of the Washington population does not differ markedly from the rest? See Northwest Ecosystem Alliance v. United States Fish and Wildlife Serv. , 475 F. 3d 1136 , 1140–1145, 1149 (CA9 2007).

Under the Medicare program, reimbursements to hospitals are adjusted to reflect “differences in hospital wage levels” across “geographic area[s].” 42 U. S. C. §1395ww(d)(3)(E)(i) . How should the Department of Health and Human Services measure a “geographic area”? By city? By county? By metropolitan area? See Bellevue Hospital Center v. Leavitt , 443 F. 3d 163 , 174–176 (CA2 2006).

Congress directed the Department of the Interior and the Federal Aviation Administration to reduce noise from aircraft flying over Grand Canyon National Park—specifically, to “provide for substantial restoration of the natural quiet.” §3(b)(1), 101 Stat. 676 ; see §3(b)(2). How much noise is consistent with “the natural quiet”? And how much of the park, for how many hours a day, must be that quiet for the “substantial restoration” requirement to be met? See Grand Canyon Air Tour Coalition v. FAA , 154 F. 3d 455 , 466–467, 474–475 (CADC 1998).

Or take Chevron itself. In amendments to the Clean Air Act, Congress told States to require permits for modifying or constructing “stationary sources” of air pollution. 42 U. S. C. §7502(c)(5) . Does the term “stationary source[ ]” refer to each pollution-emitting piece of equipment within a plant? Or does it refer to the entire plant, and thus allow escape from the permitting requirement when increased emissions from one piece of equipment are offset by reductions from another? See 467 U. S., at 857, 859. 

 In each case, a statutory phrase has more than one reasonable reading. And Congress has not chosen among them: It has not, in any real-world sense, “fixed” the “single, best meaning” at “the time of enactment” (to use the majority’s phrase). Ante , at 22. A question thus arises: Who decides which of the possible readings should govern?

 This Court has long thought that the choice should usually fall to agencies, with courts broadly deferring to their judgments. For the last 40 years, that doctrine has gone by the name of Chevron deference, after the 1984 decision that formalized and canonized it. In Chevron , the Court set out a simple two-part framework for reviewing an agency’s interpretation of a statute that it administers. First, the reviewing court must determine whether Congress has “directly spoken to the precise question at issue.” 467 U. S., at 842. That inquiry is rigorous: A court must exhaust all the “traditional tools of statutory construction” to divine statutory meaning. Id. , at 843, n. 9. And when it can find that meaning—a “single right answer”—that is “the end of the matter”: The court cannot defer because it “must give effect to the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress.” Kisor , 588 U. S., at 575 (opinion of the Court); Chevron , 467 U. S., at 842–843. But if the court, after using its whole legal toolkit, concludes that “the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue” in dispute—for any of the not-uncommon reasons discussed above—then the court must cede the primary interpretive role. Ibid. ; see supra , at 4–5. At that second step, the court asks only whether the agency construction is within the sphere of “reasonable” readings. Chevron , 467 U. S., at 844. If it is, the agency’s interpretation of the statute that it every day implements will control.

 That rule, the Court has long explained, rests on a presumption about legislative intent—about what Congress wants when a statute it has charged an agency with implementing contains an ambiguity or a gap. See id. , at 843– 845; Smiley , 517 U. S., at 740–741. An enacting Congress, as noted above, knows those uncertainties will arise, even if it does not know what they will turn out to be. See supra , at 4–5. And every once in a while, Congress provides an explicit instruction for dealing with that contingency—assigning primary responsibility to the courts, or else to an agency. But much more often, Congress does not say. Thus arises the need for a presumption—really, a default rule—for what should happen in that event. Does a statutory silence or ambiguity then go to a court for resolution? Or to an agency? This Court has long thought Congress would choose an agency, with courts serving only as a backstop to make sure the agency makes a reasonable choice among the possible readings. Or said otherwise, Congress would select the agency it has put in control of a regulatory scheme to exercise the “degree of discretion” that the statute’s lack of clarity or completeness allows. Smiley , 517 U. S., at 741. Of course, Congress can always refute that presumptive choice—can say that, really, it would prefer courts to wield that discretionary power. But until then, the presumption cuts in the agency’s favor. 2 The next question is why.

  For one, because agencies often know things about a statute’s subject matter that courts could not hope to. The point is especially stark when the statute is of a “scientific or technical nature.” Kisor , 588 U. S., at 571 (plurality opinion). Agencies are staffed with “experts in the field” who can bring their training and knowledge to bear on open statutory questions. Chevron , 467 U. S., at 865. Consider, for example, the first bulleted case above. When does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as a “protein”? See supra , at 5. I don’t know many judges who would feel confident resolving that issue. (First question: What even is an alpha amino acid polymer?) But the FDA likely has scores of scientists on staff who can think intelligently about it, maybe collaborate with each other on its finer points, and arrive at a sensible answer. Or take the perhaps more accessible-sounding second case, involving the Endangered Species Act. See supra , at 5–6. Deciding when one squirrel population is “distinct” from another (and thus warrants protection) requires knowing about species more than it does consulting a dictionary. How much variation of what kind—geographic, genetic, morphological, or behavioral—should be required? A court could, if forced to, muddle through that issue and announce a result. But wouldn’t the Fish and Wildlife Service, with all its specialized expertise, do a better job of the task—of saying what, in the context of species protection, the open-ended term “distinct” means? One idea behind the Chevron presumption is that Congress— the same Congress that charged the Service with implementing the Act—would answer that question with a resounding “yes.”

 A second idea is that Congress would value the agency’s experience with how a complex regulatory regime functions, and with what is needed to make it effective. Let’s stick with squirrels for a moment, except broaden the lens. In construing a term like “distinct” in a case about squirrels, the Service likely would benefit from its “historical familiarity” with how the term has covered the population segments of other species. Martin v. Occupational Safety and Health Review Comm’n , 499 U. S. 144 , 153 (1991); see, e.g. , Center for Biological Diversity v. Zinke , 900 F. 3d 1053 , 1060–1062 (CA9 2018) (arctic grayling); Center for Biological Diversity v. Zinke , 868 F. 3d 1054 , 1056 (CA9 2017) (desert eagle). Just as a common-law court makes better decisions as it sees multiple variations on a theme, an agency’s construction of a statutory term benefits from its unique exposure to all the related ways the term comes into play. Or consider, for another way regulatory familiarity matters, the example about adjusting Medicare reimbursement for geographic wage differences. See supra , at 6. According to a dictionary, the term “geographic area” could be as large as a multi-state region or as small as a census tract. How to choose? It would make sense to gather hard information about what reimbursement levels each approach will produce, to explore the ease of administering each on a nationwide basis, to survey how regulators have dealt with similar questions in the past, and to confer with the hospitals themselves about what makes sense. See Kisor , 588 U. S., at 571 (plurality opinion) (noting that agencies are able to “conduct factual investigations” and “consult with affected parties”). Congress knows the Department of Health and Human Services can do all those things—and that courts cannot.

 Still more, Chevron ’s presumption reflects that resolving  statutory ambiguities, as Congress well knows, is “often more a question of policy than of law.” Pauley v. BethEnergy Mines, Inc. , 501 U. S. 680 , 696 (1991). The task is less one of construing a text than of balancing competing goals and values. Consider the statutory directive to achieve “substantial restoration of the [Grand Canyon’s] natural quiet.” See supra , at 6. Someone is going to have to decide exactly what that statute means for air traffic over the canyon. How many flights, in what places and at what times, are consistent with restoring enough natural quiet on the ground? That is a policy trade-off of a kind familiar to agencies—but peculiarly unsuited to judges. Or consider Chevron itself. As the Court there understood, the choice between defining a “stationary source” as a whole plant or as a pollution-emitting device is a choice about how to “reconcile” two “manifestly competing interests.” 467 U. S., at 865. The plantwide definition relaxes the permitting requirement in the interest of promoting economic growth; the device-specific definition strengthens that requirement to better reduce air pollution. See id. , at 851, 863, 866. Again, that is a choice a judge should not be making, but one an agency properly can. Agencies are “subject to the supervision of the President, who in turn answers to the public.” Kisor , 588 U. S., at 571–572 (plurality opinion). So when faced with a statutory ambiguity, “an agency to which Congress has delegated policymaking responsibilities” may rely on an accountable actor’s “views of wise policy to inform its judgments.” Chevron , 467 U. S., at 865.

 None of this is to say that deference to agencies is always appropriate. The Court over time has fine-tuned the Chevron regime to deny deference in classes of cases in which Congress has no reason to prefer an agency to a court. The majority treats those “refinements” as a flaw in the scheme, ante , at 27, but they are anything but. Consider the rule that an agency gets no deference when construing a statute it is not responsible for administering. See Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis , 584 U. S. 497 , 519–520 (2018). Well, of course not—if Congress has not put an agency in charge of implementing a statute, Congress would not have given the agency a special role in its construction. Or take the rule that an agency will not receive deference if it has reached its decision without using—or without using properly—its rulemaking or adjudicatory authority. See United States v. Mead Corp. , 533 U. S. 218 , 226–227 (2001); Encino Motorcars, LLC v. Navarro , 579 U. S. 211 , 220 (2016). Again, that should not be surprising: Congress expects that authoritative pronouncements on a law’s meaning will come from the procedures it has enacted to foster “fairness and deliberation” in agency decision-making. Mead , 533 U. S., at 230. Or finally, think of the “extraordinary cases” involving questions of vast “economic and political significance” in which the Court has declined to defer. King v. Burwell , 576 U. S. 473 , 485–486 (2015). The theory is that Congress would not have left matters of such import to an agency, but would instead have insisted on maintaining control. So the Chevron refinements proceed from the same place as the original doctrine. Taken together, they give interpretive primacy to the agency when—but only when—it is acting, as Congress specified, in the heartland of its delegated authority.

 That carefully calibrated framework “reflects a sensitivity to the proper roles of the political and judicial branches.” Pauley , 501 U. S., at 696. Where Congress has spoken, Congress has spoken; only its judgments matter. And courts alone determine when that has happened: Using all their normal interpretive tools, they decide whether Congress has addressed a given issue. But when courts have decided that Congress has not done so, a choice arises. Absent a legislative directive, either the administering agency or a court must take the lead. And the matter is more fit for the agency. The decision is likely to involve the agency’s subject-matter expertise; to fall within its sphere of regulatory  experience; and to involve policy choices, including cost-benefit assessments and trade-offs between conflicting values. So a court without relevant expertise or experience, and without warrant to make policy calls, appropriately steps back. The court still has a role to play: It polices the agency to ensure that it acts within the zone of reasonable options. But the court does not insert itself into an agency’s expertise-driven, policy-laden functions. That is the arrangement best suited to keep every actor in its proper lane. And it is the one best suited to ensure that Congress’s statutes work in the way Congress intended.

 The majority makes two points in reply, neither convincing. First, it insists that “agencies have no special competence” in filling gaps or resolving ambiguities in regulatory statutes; rather, “[c]ourts do.” Ante , at 23. Score one for self-confidence; maybe not so high for self-reflection or  -knowledge. Of course courts often construe legal texts, hopefully well. And Chevron ’s first step takes full advantage of that talent: There, a court tries to divine what Congress meant, even in the most complicated or abstruse statutory schemes. The deference comes in only if the court cannot do so—if the court must admit that standard legal tools will not avail to fill a statutory silence or give content to an ambiguous term. That is when the issues look like the ones I started off with: When does an alpha amino acid polymer qualify as a “protein”? How distinct is “distinct” for squirrel populations? What size “geographic area” will ensure appropriate hospital reimbursement? As between two equally feasible understandings of “stationary source,” should one choose the one more protective of the environment or the one more favorable to economic growth? The idea that courts have “special competence” in deciding such questions whereas agencies have “no[ne]” is, if I may say, malarkey. Answering those questions right does not mainly demand the interpretive skills courts possess. Instead, it demands one or more of: subject-matter expertise,  long engagement with a regulatory scheme, and policy choice. It is courts (not agencies) that “have no special competence”—or even legitimacy—when those are the things a decision calls for.

 Second, the majority complains that an ambiguity or gap does not “necessarily reflect a congressional intent that an agency” should have primary interpretive authority. Ante , at 22. On that score, I’ll agree with the premise: It doesn’t “necessarily” do so. Chevron is built on a presumption . The decision does not maintain that Congress in every case wants the agency, rather than a court, to fill in gaps. The decision maintains that when Congress does not expressly pick one or the other, we need a default rule; and the best default rule—agency or court?—is the one we think Congress would generally want. As to why Congress would generally want the agency: The answer lies in everything said above about Congress’s delegation of regulatory power to the agency and the agency’s special competencies. See supra , at 9–11. The majority appears to think it is a showstopping rejoinder to note that many statutory gaps and ambiguities are “unintentional.” Ante , at 22. But to begin, many are not; the ratio between the two is uncertain. See supra , at 4–5. And to end, why should that matter in any event? Congress may not have deliberately introduced a gap or ambiguity into the statute; but it knows that pretty much everything it drafts will someday be found to contain such a “flaw.” Given that knowledge, Chevron asks, what would Congress want? The presumed answer is again the same (for the same reasons): The agency. And as with any default rule, if Congress decides otherwise, all it need do is say.

 In that respect, the proof really is in the pudding: Congress basically never says otherwise, suggesting that Chevron chose the presumption aligning with legislative intent (or, in the majority’s words, “approximat[ing] reality,” ante , at 22). Over the last four decades, Congress has authorized  or reauthorized hundreds of statutes. The drafters of those statutes knew all about Chevron . See A. Gluck & L. Bressman, Statutory Interpretation From the Inside—An Empirical Study of Congressional Drafting, Delegation, and the Canons: Part I, 65 Stan. L. Rev. 901, 928 (fig. 2), 994 (2013). So if they had wanted a different assignment of interpretive responsibility, they would have inserted a provision to that effect. With just a pair of exceptions I know of, they did not. See 12 U. S. C. §25b(b)(5)(A) (exception #1); 15 U. S. C. §8302(c)(3)(A) (exception #2). Similarly, Congress has declined to enact proposed legislation that would abolish Chevron across the board. See S. 909, 116th Cong., 1st Sess., §2 (2019) (still a bill, not a law); H. R. 5, 115th Cong., 1st Sess., §202 (2017) (same). So to the extent the majority is worried that the Chevron presumption is “fiction[al],” ante , at 26—as all legal presumptions in some sense are—it has gotten less and less so every day for 40 years. The congressional reaction shows as well as anything could that the Chevron Court read Congress right.

 The majority’s principal arguments are in a different vein. Around 80 years after the APA was enacted and 40 years after Chevron , the majority has decided that the former precludes the latter. The APA’s Section 706, the majority says, “makes clear” that agency interpretations of statutes “are not entitled to deference.” Ante , at 14–15 (emphasis in original). And that provision, the majority continues, codified the contemporaneous law, which likewise did not allow for deference. See ante, at 9–13, 15–16. But neither the APA nor the pre-APA state of the law does the work that the majority claims. Both are perfectly compatible with Chevron deference.

 Section 706, enacted with the rest of the APA in 1946, provides for judicial review of agency action. It states: “To the extent necessary to decision and when presented, the  reviewing court shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action.” 5 U. S. C. §706 .

 That text, contra the majority, “does not resolve the Chevron question.” C. Sunstein, Chevron As Law, 107 Geo. L. J. 1613, 1642 (2019) (Sunstein). Or said a bit differently, Section 706 is “generally indeterminate” on the matter of deference. A. Vermeule, Judging Under Uncertainty 207 (2006) (Vermeule). The majority highlights the phrase “decide all relevant questions of law” (italicizing the “all”), and notes that the provision “prescribes no deferential standard” for answering those questions. Ante , at 14. But just as the provision does not prescribe a deferential standard of review, so too it does not prescribe a de novo standard of review (in which the court starts from scratch, without giving deference). In point of fact, Section 706 does not specify any standard of review for construing statutes. See Kisor , 588 U. S., at 581 (plurality opinion). And when a court uses a deferential standard—here, by deciding whether an agency reading is reasonable—it just as much “decide[s]” a “relevant question[ ] of law” as when it uses a de novo standard. §706. The deferring court then conforms to Section 706 “by determining whether the agency has stayed within the bounds of its assigned discretion—that is, whether the agency has construed [the statute it administers] reasonably.” J. Manning, Chevron and the Reasonable Legislator, 128 Harv. L. Rev. 457, 459 (2014); see Arlington v. FCC , 569 U. S. 290 , 317 (2013) ( Roberts , C. J., dissenting) (“We do not ignore [Section 706’s] command when we afford an agency’s statutory interpretation Chevron deference; we respect it”). 3

  Section 706’s references to standards of review in other contexts only further undercut the majority’s argument. The majority notes that Section 706 requires deferential review for agency fact-finding and policy-making (under, respectively, a substantial-evidence standard and an arbitrary-and-capricious standard). See ante , at 14. Congress, the majority claims, “surely would have articulated a similarly deferential standard applicable to questions of law had it intended to depart” from de novo review. Ibid. Surely? In another part of Section 706, Congress explicitly referred to de novo review. §706(2)(F). With all those references to standards of review—both deferential and not—running around Section 706, what is “telling” ( ante , at 14) is the absence of any standard for reviewing an agency’s statutory constructions. That silence left the matter, as noted above, “generally indeterminate”: Section 706 neither mandates nor forbids Chevron -style deference. Vermeule 207. 4

  And contra the majority, most “respected commentators” understood Section 706 in that way—as allowing, even if not requiring, deference. Ante , at 16. The finest administrative law scholars of the time (call them that generation’s Manning, Sunstein, and Vermeule) certainly did. Professor Louis Jaffe described something very like the Chevron two-step as the preferred method of reviewing agency interpretations under the APA. A court, he said, first “must decide as a ‘question of law’ whether there is ‘discretion’ in the premises.” Judicial Control of Administrative Action 570 (1965). That is akin to step 1: Did Congress speak to the issue, or did it leave openness? And if the latter, Jaffe continued, the agency’s view “if ‘reasonable’ is free of control.” Ibid. That of course looks like step 2: defer if reasonable. And just in case that description was too complicated, Jaffe conveyed his main point this way: The argument that courts “must decide all questions of law”—as if there were no agency in the picture—“is, in my opinion, unsound.” Id. , at 569. Similarly, Professor Kenneth Culp Davis, author of the then-preeminent treatise on administrative law, noted with approval that “reasonableness” review of agency interpretations—in which courts “refused to substitute judgment”—had “survived the APA.” Administrative Law 880, 883, 885 (1951) (Davis). Other contemporaneous scholars and experts agreed. See R. Levin, The APA and the Assault on Deference, 106 Minn. L. Rev. 125, 181–183 (2021) (Levin) (listing many of them). They did not see in their own time what the majority finds there today. 5

  Nor, evidently, did the Supreme Court. In the years after the APA was enacted, the Court “never indicated that section 706 rejected the idea that courts might defer to agency interpretations of law.” Sunstein 1654. Indeed, not a single Justice so much as floated that view of the APA. To the contrary, the Court issued a number of decisions in those years deferring to an agency’s statutory interpretation. See, e.g. , Unemployment Compensation Comm’n of Alaska v. Aragon , 329 U. S. 143 , 153–154 (1946); NLRB v. E. C. Atkins & Co. , 331 U. S. 398 , 403 (1947); Cardillo v. Liberty Mut. Ins. Co. , 330 U. S. 469 , 478–479 (1947). And that continued right up until Chevron . See, e.g. , Mitchell v. Budd , 350 U. S. 473 , 480 (1956); Zenith Radio Corp. v. United States , 437 U. S. 443 , 450 (1978). To be clear: Deference in those years was not always given to interpretations that would receive it under Chevron . The practice then was more inconsistent and less fully elaborated than it later became. The point here is only that the Court came nowhere close to accepting the majority’s view of the APA. Take the language from Section 706 that the majority most relies on: “decide all relevant questions of law.” See ante , at 14. In the decade after the APA’s enactment, those words were used only four times in Supreme Court opinions (all in footnotes)—and never to suggest that courts could not defer to agency interpretations. See Sunstein 1656.

  The majority’s view of Section 706 likewise gets no support from how judicial review operated in the years leading up to the APA. That prior history matters: As the majority recognizes, Section 706 was generally understood to “restate[ ] the present law as to the scope of judicial review.”  Dept. of Justice, Attorney General’s Manual on the Administrative Procedure Act 108 (1947); ante , at 15–16. The problem for the majority is that in the years preceding the APA, courts became ever more deferential to agencies. New Deal administrative programs had by that point come into their own. And this Court and others, in a fairly short time, had abandoned their initial resistance and gotten on board. Justice Breyer, wearing his administrative-law-scholar hat, characterized the pre-APA period this way: “[J]udicial review of administrative action was curtailed, and particular agency decisions were frequently sustained with judicial obeisance to the mysteries of administrative expertise.” S. Breyer et al., Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy 21 (7th ed. 2011). And that description extends to review of an agency’s statutory constructions. An influential study of administrative practice, published five years before the APA’s enactment, described the state of play: Judicial “review may, in some instances at least, be limited to the inquiry whether the administrative construction is a permissible one.” Final Report of Attorney General’s Committee on Administrative Procedure (1941), reprinted in Administrative Procedure in Government Agencies, S. Doc. No. 8, 77th Cong., 1st Sess., 78 (1941). Or again: “[W]here the statute is reasonably susceptible of more than one interpretation, the court may accept that of the administrative body.” Id. , at 90–91. 6

  Two prominent Supreme Court decisions of the 1940s put those principles into action. Gray v. Powell , 314 U. S. 402 (1941) , was then widely understood as “the leading case” on review of agency interpretations. Davis 882; see ibid. (noting that it “establish[ed] what is known as ‘the doctrine of Gray v. Powell’ ”). There, the Court deferred to an agency construction of the term “producer” as used in a statutory exemption from price controls. Congress, the Court explained, had committed the scope of the exemption to the agency because its “experience in [the] field gave promise of a better informed, more equitable, adjustment of the conflicting interests.” Gray , 314 U. S., at 412. Accordingly, the Court concluded that it was “not the province of a court” to “substitute its judgment” for the agency’s. Ibid. Three years later, the Court decided NLRB v. Hearst Publications, Inc. , 322 U. S. 111 (1944) , another acknowledged “leading case.” Davis 882; see id. , at 884. The Court again deferred, this time to an agency’s construction of the term “employee” in the National Labor Relations Act. The scope of that term, the Court explained, “belong[ed] to” the agency to answer based on its “[e]veryday experience in the administration of the statute.” Hearst , 322 U. S., at 130. The Court therefore “limited” its review to whether the agency’s reading had “warrant in the record and a reasonable basis in  law.” Id. , at 131. 7 Recall here that even the majority accepts that Section 706 was meant to “restate[ ] the present law” as to judicial review. See ante , at 15–16; supra , at 19–20. Well then? It sure would seem that the provision allows a deference regime.

 The majority has no way around those two noteworthy decisions. It first appears to distinguish between “pure legal question[s]” and the so-called mixed questions in Gray and Hearst , involving the application of a legal standard to a set of facts. Ante , at 11. If in drawing that distinction, the majority intends to confine its holding to the pure type of legal issue—thus enabling courts to defer when law and facts are entwined—I’d be glad. But I suspect the majority has no such intent, because that approach would preserve Chevron in a substantial part of its current domain. Cf. Wilkinson v. Garland , 601 U. S. 209 , 230 (2024) ( Alito, J., dissenting) (noting, in the immigration context, that the universe of mixed questions swamps that of pure legal ones). It is frequently in the consideration of mixed questions that the scope of statutory terms is established and their meaning defined. See H. Monaghan, Marbury and the  Administrative State, 83 Colum. L. Rev. 1, 29 (1983) (“Administrative application of law is administrative formulation of law whenever it involves elaboration of the statutory norm”). How does a statutory interpreter decide, as in Hearst , what an “employee” is? In large part through cases asking whether the term covers people performing specific jobs, like (in that case) “newsboys.” 322 U. S., at 120. Or consider one of the examples I offered above. How does an interpreter decide when one population segment of a species is “distinct” from another? Often by considering that requirement with respect to particular species, like western gray squirrels. So the distinction the majority offers makes no real-world (or even theoretical) sense. If the Hearst Court was deferring to an agency on whether the term “employee” covered newsboys, it was deferring to the agency on the scope and meaning of the term “employee.”

 The majority’s next rejoinder—that “the Court was far from consistent” in deferring—falls equally flat. Ante , at 12. I am perfectly ready to acknowledge that in the pre-APA period, a deference regime had not yet taken complete hold. I’ll go even further: Let’s assume that deference was then an on-again, off-again function (as the majority seems to suggest, see ante , at 11–12, and 13, n. 3). Even on that assumption, the majority’s main argument—that Section 706 prohibited deferential review—collapses. Once again, the majority agrees that Section 706 was not meant to change the then-prevailing law. See ante , at 15–16. And even if inconsistent, that law cannot possibly be thought to have prohibited deference. Or otherwise said: “If Section 706 did not change the law of judicial review (as we have long recognized), then it did not proscribe a deferential standard then known and in use.” Kisor , 588 U. S., at 583 (plurality opinion).

 The majority’s whole argument for overturning Chevron relies on Section 706. But the text of Section 706 does not support that result. And neither does the contemporaneous  practice, which that text was supposed to reflect. So today’s decision has no basis in the only law the majority deems relevant. It is grounded on air.

 And still there is worse, because abandoning Chevron subverts every known principle of stare decisis . Of course, respecting precedent is not an “inexorable command.” Payne v. Tennessee , 501 U. S. 808 , 828 (1991). But overthrowing it requires far more than the majority has offered up here. Chevron is entitled to stare decisis ’s strongest form of protection. The majority thus needs an exceptionally strong reason to overturn the decision, above and beyond thinking it wrong. And it has nothing approaching such a justification, proposing only a bewildering theory about Chevron ’s “unworkability.” Ante , at 32. Just five years ago, this Court in Kisor rejected a plea to overrule Auer v. Robbins , 519 U. S. 452 (1997) , which requires judicial deference to agencies’ interpretations of their own regulations. See 588 U. S., at 586–589 (opinion of the Court). The case against overruling Chevron is at least as strong. In particular, the majority’s decision today will cause a massive shock to the legal system, “cast[ing] doubt on many settled constructions” of statutes and threatening the interests of many parties who have relied on them for years. 588 U. S., at 587 (opinion of the Court).

 Adherence to precedent is “a foundation stone of the rule of law.” Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community , 572 U. S. 782 , 798 (2014). Stare decisis “promotes the evenhanded, predictable, and consistent development of legal principles.” Payne , 501 U. S., at 827. It enables people to order their lives in reliance on judicial decisions. And it “contributes to the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process,” by ensuring that those decisions are founded in the law, and not in the “personal preferences” of judges. Id. , at 828; Dobbs , 597 U. S., at 388 (dissenting opinion).  Perhaps above all else, stare decisis is a “doctrine of judicial modesty.” Id. , at 363. In that, it shares something important with Chevron . Both tell judges that they do not know everything, and would do well to attend to the views of others. So today, the majority rejects what judicial humility counsels not just once but twice over.

 And Chevron is entitled to a particularly strong form of stare decisis , for two separate reasons. First, it matters that “Congress remains free to alter what we have done.” Patterson v. McLean Credit Union , 491 U. S. 164 , 173 (1989); see Kisor , 588 U. S., at 587 (opinion of the Court) (making the same point for Auer deference). In a constitutional case, the Court alone can correct an error. But that is not so here. “Our deference decisions are balls tossed into Congress’s court, for acceptance or not as that branch elects.” 588 U. S., at 587–588 (opinion of the Court). And for generations now, Congress has chosen acceptance. Throughout those years, Congress could have abolished Chevron across the board, most easily by amending the APA. Or it could have eliminated deferential review in discrete areas, by amending old laws or drafting new laws to include an anti- Chevron provision. Instead, Congress has “spurned multiple opportunities” to do a comprehensive rejection of Chevron , and has hardly ever done a targeted one. Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment, LLC , 576 U. S. 446 , 456 (2015); see supra , at 14–15. Or to put the point more affirmatively, Congress has kept Chevron as is for 40 years. It maintained that position even as Members of this Court began to call Chevron into question. See ante , at 30. From all it appears, Congress has not agreed with the view of some Justices that they and other judges should have more power.

 Second, Chevron is by now much more than a single decision. This Court alone, acting as Chevron allows, has upheld an agency’s reasonable interpretation of a statute at least 70 times. See Brief for United States in No. 22–1219,  p. 27; App. to id ., at 68a–72a (collecting cases). Lower courts have applied the Chevron framework on thousands upon thousands of occasions. See K. Barnett & C. Walker, Chevron and Stare Decisis, 31 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 475, 477, and n. 11 (2024) (noting that at last count, Chevron was cited in more than 18,000 federal-court decisions). The Kisor Court observed, when upholding Auer , that “[d]eference to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous rules pervades the whole corpus of administrative law.” 588 U. S., at 587 (opinion of the Court). So too does deference to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes—except more so. Chevron is as embedded as embedded gets in the law.

 The majority says differently, because this Court has ignored Chevron lately; all that is left of the decision is a “decaying husk with bold pretensions.” Ante , at 33. Tell that to the D. C. Circuit, the court that reviews a large share of agency interpretations, where Chevron remains alive and well. See, e.g. , Lissack v. Commissioner , 68 F. 4th 1312, 1321–1322 (2023); Solar Energy Industries Assn. v. FERC , 59 F. 4th 1287, 1291–1294 (2023). But more to the point: The majority’s argument is a bootstrap. This Court has “avoided deferring under Chevron since 2016” ( ante , at 32) because it has been preparing to overrule Chevron since around that time. That kind of self-help on the way to reversing precedent has become almost routine at this Court. Stop applying a decision where one should; “throw some gratuitous criticisms into a couple of opinions”; issue a few separate writings “question[ing the decision’s] premises” ( ante , at 30); give the whole process a few years . . . and voila!—you have a justification for overruling the decision. Janus v. State, County, and Municipal Employees , 585 U. S. 878 , 950 (2018) ( Kagan, J. , dissenting) (discussing the overruling of Abood v. Detroit Bd. of Ed. , 431 U. S. 209 (1977) ); see also, e.g. , Kennedy v. Bremerton School Dist. , 597 U. S. 507 , 571–572 (2022) ( Sotomayor, J. , dissenting) (similar  for Lemon v. Kurtzman , 403 U. S. 602 (1971) ); Shelby County v. Holder , 570 U. S. 529 , 587–588 (2013) (Ginsburg , J. , dissenting) (similar for South Carolina v. Katzenbach , 383 U. S. 301 (1966) ). I once remarked that this overruling-through-enfeeblement technique “mock[ed] stare decisis .” Janus , 585 U. S., at 950 (dissenting opinion). I have seen no reason to change my mind.

 The majority does no better in its main justification for overruling Chevron —that the decision is “unworkable.” Ante , at 30. The majority’s first theory on that score is that there is no single “answer” about what “ambiguity” means: Some judges turn out to see more of it than others do, leading to “different results.” Ante , at 30–31. But even if so, the legal system has for many years, in many contexts, dealt perfectly well with that variation. Take contract law. It is hornbook stuff that when (but only when) a contract is ambiguous, a court interpreting it can consult extrinsic evidence. See CNH Industrial N.V. v. Reese , 583 U. S. 133 , 139 (2018) ( per curiam ). And when all interpretive tools still leave ambiguity, the contract is construed against the drafter. See Lamps Plus, Inc. v. Varela , 587 U. S. 176 , 186–187 (2019). So I guess the contract rules of the 50 States are unworkable now. Or look closer to home, to doctrines this Court regularly applies. In deciding whether a government has waived sovereign immunity, we construe “[a]ny ambiguities in the statutory language” in “favor of immunity.” FAA v. Cooper , 566 U. S. 284 , 290 (2012). Similarly, the rule of lenity tells us to construe ambiguous statutes in favor of criminal defendants. See United States v. Castleman , 572 U. S. 157 , 172–173 (2014). And the canon of constitutional avoidance instructs us to construe ambiguous laws to avoid difficult constitutional questions. See United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative , 532 U. S. 483 , 494 (2001). I could go on, but the point is made. There are ambiguity triggers all over the law. Somehow everyone seems to get by.

  And Chevron is an especially puzzling decision to criticize on the ground of generating too much judicial divergence. There’s good empirical—meaning, non-impressionistic—evidence on exactly that subject. And it shows that, as compared with de novo review, use of the Chevron two-step framework fosters agreement among judges. See K. Barnett, C. Boyd, & C. Walker, Administrative Law’s Political Dynamics, 71 Vand. L. Rev. 1463, 1502 (2018) (Barnett). More particularly, Chevron has a “powerful constraining effect on partisanship in judicial decisionmaking.” Barnett 1463 (italics deleted); see Sunstein 1672 (“[A] predictable effect of overruling Chevron would be to ensure a far greater role for judicial policy preferences in statutory interpretation and far more common splits along ideological lines”). So if consistency among judges is the majority’s lodestar, then the Court should not overrule Chevron , but return to using it.

 The majority’s second theory on workability is likewise a makeweight. Chevron , the majority complains, has some exceptions, which (so the majority says) are “difficult” and “complicate[d]” to apply. Ante , at 32. Recall that courts are not supposed to defer when the agency construing a statute (1) has not been charged with administering that law; (2) has not used deliberative procedures— i.e., notice-and-comment rulemaking or adjudication; or (3) is intervening in a “major question,” of great economic and political significance. See supra , at 11–12; ante , at 27–28. As I’ve explained, those exceptions—the majority also aptly calls them “refinements”—fit with Chevron ’s rationale: They define circumstances in which Congress is unlikely to have wanted agency views to govern. Ante , at 27; see supra , at 11–12. And on the difficulty scale, they are nothing much. Has Congress put the agency in charge of administering the statute? In 99 of 100 cases, everyone will agree on the answer with scarcely a moment’s thought. Did the agency use notice-and-comment or an adjudication before rendering an  interpretation? Once again, I could stretch my mind and think up a few edge cases, but for the most part, the answer is an easy yes or no. The major questions exception is, I acknowledge, different: There, many judges have indeed disputed its nature and scope. Compare, e . g ., West Virginia , 597 U. S., at 721–724, with id ., at 764–770 ( Kagan , J., dissenting). But that disagreement concerns, on everyone’s view, a tiny subset of all agency interpretations. For the most part, the exceptions that so upset the majority require merely a rote, check-the-box inquiry. If that is the majority’s idea of a “dizzying breakdance,” ante , at 32, the majority needs to get out more.

 And anyway, difficult as compared to what? The majority’s prescribed way of proceeding is no walk in the park. First, the majority makes clear that what is usually called Skidmore deference continues to apply. See ante , at 16–17. Under that decision, agency interpretations “constitute a body of experience and informed judgment” that may be “entitled to respect.” Skidmore v. Swift & Co. , 323 U. S. 134 , 140 (1944). If the majority thinks that the same judges who argue today about where “ambiguity” resides (see ante , at 30) are not going to argue tomorrow about what “respect” requires, I fear it will be gravely disappointed. Second, the majority directs courts to comply with the varied ways in which Congress in fact “delegates discretionary authority” to agencies. Ante , at 17–18. For example, Congress may authorize an agency to “define[ ]” or “delimit[ ]” statutory terms or concepts, or to “fill up the details” of a statutory scheme. Ante , at 17, and n. 5. Or Congress may use, in describing an agency’s regulatory authority, inherently “flexib[le]” language like “appropriate” or “reasonable.” Ante , at 17, and n. 6. Attending to every such delegation, as the majority says, is necessary in a world without Chevron . But that task involves complexities of its own. Indeed, one reason Justice Scalia supported Chevron was that it re placed such a “statute-by-statute evaluation (which was assuredly a font of uncertainty and litigation) with an across-the-board presumption.” A. Scalia, Judicial Deference to Administrative Interpretations of Law, 1989 Duke L. J. 511, 516. As a lover of the predictability that rules create, Justice Scalia thought the latter “unquestionably better.” Id. , at 517.

 On the other side of the balance, the most important stare decisis factor—call it the “jolt to the legal system” issue—weighs heavily against overruling Chevron . Dobbs , 597 U. S., at 357 ( Roberts, C. J. , concurring in judgment). Congress and agencies alike have relied on Chevron —have assumed its existence—in much of their work for the last 40 years. Statutes passed during that time reflect the expectation that Chevron would allocate interpretive authority between agencies and courts. Rules issued during the period likewise presuppose that statutory ambiguities were the agencies’ to (reasonably) resolve. Those agency interpretations may have benefited regulated entities; or they may have protected members of the broader public. Either way, private parties have ordered their affairs—their business and financial decisions, their health-care decisions, their educational decisions—around agency actions that are suddenly now subject to challenge. In Kisor , this Court refused to overrule Auer because doing so would “cast doubt on” many longstanding constructions of rules, and thereby upset settled expectations. 588 U. S., at 587 (opinion of the Court). Overruling Chevron , and thus raising new doubts about agency constructions of statutes, will be far more disruptive.

 The majority tries to alleviate concerns about a piece of that problem: It states that judicial decisions that have upheld agency action as reasonable under Chevron should not be overruled on that account alone. See ante , at 34–35. That is all to the good: There are thousands of such decisions, many settled for decades. See supra , at 26. But first,  reasonable reliance need not be predicated on a prior judicial decision. Some agency interpretations never challenged under Chevron now will be; expectations formed around those constructions thus could be upset, in a way the majority’s assurance does not touch. And anyway, how good is that assurance, really? The majority says that a decision’s “[m]ere reliance on Chevron ” is not enough to counter the force of stare decisis ; a challenger will need an additional “special justification.” Ante , at 34. The majority is sanguine; I am not so much. Courts motivated to overrule an old Chevron -based decision can always come up with something to label a “special justification.” Maybe a court will say “the quality of [the precedent’s] reasoning” was poor. Ante , at 29. Or maybe the court will discover something “unworkable” in the decision—like some exception that has to be applied. Ante , at 30. All a court need do is look to today’s opinion to see how it is done.

Judges are not experts in the field, and are not part of either political branch of the Government.

  — Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural ResourcesDefense Council, Inc. , 467 U. S. 837 , 865 (1984)

 Those were the days, when we knew what we are not. When we knew that as between courts and agencies, Congress would usually think agencies the better choice to resolve the ambiguities and fill the gaps in regulatory statutes. Because agencies are “experts in the field.” And because they are part of a political branch, with a claim to making interstitial policy. And because Congress has charged them, not us, with administering the statutes containing the open questions. At its core, Chevron is about respecting that allocation of responsibility—the conferral of primary authority over regulatory matters to agencies, not courts.

  Today, the majority does not respect that judgment. It gives courts the power to make all manner of scientific and technical judgments. It gives courts the power to make all manner of policy calls, including about how to weigh competing goods and values. (See Chevron itself.) It puts courts at the apex of the administrative process as to every conceivable subject—because there are always gaps and ambiguities in regulatory statutes, and often of great import. What actions can be taken to address climate change or other environmental challenges? What will the Nation’s health-care system look like in the coming decades? Or the financial or transportation systems? What rules are going to constrain the development of A.I.? In every sphere of current or future federal regulation, expect courts from now on to play a commanding role. It is not a role Congress has given to them, in the APA or any other statute. It is a role this Court has now claimed for itself, as well as for other judges.

 And that claim requires disrespecting, too, this Court’s precedent. There are no special reasons, of the kind usually invoked for overturning precedent, to eliminate Chevron deference. And given Chevron ’s pervasiveness, the decision to do so is likely to produce large-scale disruption. All that backs today’s decision is the majority’s belief that Chevron was wrong—that it gave agencies too much power and courts not enough. But shifting views about the worth of regulatory actors and their work do not justify overhauling a cornerstone of administrative law. In that sense too, today’s majority has lost sight of its proper role.

 And it is impossible to pretend that today’s decision is a one-off, in either its treatment of agencies or its treatment of precedent. As to the first, this very Term presents yet another example of the Court’s resolve to roll back agency authority, despite congressional direction to the contrary. See SEC v. Jarkesy , 603 U. S. ___ (2024); see also supra , at 3. As to the second, just my own defenses of stare decisis — my own dissents to this Court’s reversals of settled law—by now fill a small volume. See Dobbs , 597 U. S., at 363–364 (joint opinion of Breyer, Sotomayor , and Kagan , JJ.); Edwards v. Vannoy , 593 U. S. 255 , 296–297 (2021); Knick v. Township of Scott , 588 U. S. 180 , 207–208 (2019); Janus , 585 U. S. , at 931–932. Once again, with respect, I dissent.

1 * Justice Jackson did not participate in the consideration or decision of the case in No. 22–451 and joins this opinion only as it applies to the case in No. 22–1219.

2  Note that presumptions of this kind are common in the law. In other contexts, too, the Court responds to a congressional lack of direction by adopting a presumption about what Congress wants, rather than trying to figure that out in every case. And then Congress can legislate, with “predictable effects,” against that “stable background” rule. Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd. , 561 U. S. 247 , 261 (2010). Take the presumption against extraterritoriality: The Court assumes Congress means for its statutes to apply only within the United States, absent a “clear indication” to the contrary. Id. , at 255. Or the presumption against retroactivity: The Court assumes Congress wants its laws to apply only prospectively, unless it “unambiguously instruct[s]” something different. Vartelas v. Holder , 566 U. S. 257 , 266 (2012). Or the presumption against repeal of statutes by implication: The Court assumes Congress does not intend a later statute to displace an earlier one unless it makes that intention “clear and manifest.” Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis , 584 U. S. 497 , 510 (2018). Or the (so far unnamed) presumption against treating a procedural requirement as “jurisdictional” unless “Congress clearly states that it is.” Boechler v. Commissioner , 596 U. S. 199 , 203 (2022). I could continue, except that this footnote is long enough. The Chevron deference rule is to the same effect: The Court generally assumes that Congress intends to confer discretion on agencies to handle statutory ambiguities or gaps, absent a direction to the contrary. The majority calls that presumption a “fiction,” ante , at 26, but it is no more so than any of the presumptions listed above. They all are best guesses—and usually quite good guesses—by courts about congressional intent.

3  The majority tries to buttress its argument with a stray sentence or two from the APA’s legislative history, but the same response holds. As the majority notes, see ante , at 15, the House and Senate Reports each stated that Section 706 “provid[ed] that questions of law are for courts rather than agencies to decide in the last analysis.” H. R. Rep. No. 1980, 79th Cong., 2d Sess., 44 (1946); S. Rep. No. 752, 79th Cong., 1st Sess., 28 (1945). But that statement also does not address the standard of review that courts should then use. When a court defers under Chevron , it reviews the agency’s construction for reasonableness “in the last analysis.” The views of Representative Walter, which the majority also cites, further demonstrate my point. He stated that the APA would require courts to “determine independently all relevant questions of law,” but he also stated that courts would be required to “exercise . . . independent judgment” in applying the substantial-evidence standard (a deferential standard if ever there were one). 92 Cong. Rec. 5654 (1946). He therefore did not equate “independent” review with de novo review; he thought that a court could conduct independent review of agency action using a deferential standard.

4  In a footnote responding to the last two paragraphs, the majority raises the white flag on Section 706’s text. See ante , at 15, n. 4. Yes, it finally concedes, Section 706 does not say that de novo review is required for an agency’s statutory construction. Rather, the majority says, “some things go without saying,” and de novo review is such a thing. See ibid. But why? What extra-textual considerations force us to read Section 706 the majority’s way? In its footnote, the majority repairs only to history. But as I will explain below, the majority also gets wrong the most relevant history, pertaining to how judicial review of agency interpretations operated in the years before the APA was enacted. See infra , at 19–23.

5  I concede one exception (whose view was “almost completely isolated,” Levin 181), but his comments on Section 706 refute a different aspect of the majority’s argument. Professor John Dickinson, as the majority notes, thought that Section 706 precluded courts from deferring to agency interpretations. See Administrative Procedure Act: Scope and Grounds of Broadened Judicial Review, 33 A. B. A. J. 434, 516 (1947) (Dickinson); ante , at 16. But unlike the majority, he viewed that bar as “a change” to, not a restatement of, pre-APA law. Compare Dickinson 516 with ante , at 15–16. So if the majority really wants to rely on Professor Dickinson, it will have to give up the claim, which I address below, that the law before the APA forbade deference. See infra , at 19–23.

6  Because the APA was meant to “restate[ ] the present law,” the judicial review practices of the 1940s are more important to understanding the statute than is any earlier tradition (such as the majority dwells on). But before I expand on those APA-contemporaneous practices, I pause to note that they were “not built on sand.” Kisor v. Wilkie , 588 U. S. 558 , 568–569 (2019) (plurality opinion). Since the early days of the Republic, this Court has given significant weight to official interpretations of “ambiguous law[s].” Edwards’ Lessee v. Darby , 12 Wheat. 206, 210 (1827). With the passage of time—and the growth of the administrative sphere—those “judicial expressions of deference increased.” H. Monaghan, Marbury and the Administrative State, 83 Colum. L. Rev. 1, 15 (1983). By the early 20th century, the Court stated that it would afford “great weight” to an agency construction in the face of statutory “uncertainty or ambiguity.” National Lead Co. v. United States , 252 U. S. 140 , 145 (1920); see Schell’s Executors v. Fauché , 138 U. S. 562 , 572 (1891) (“controlling” weight in “all cases of ambiguity”); United States v. Alabama Great Southern R. Co. , 142 U. S. 615 , 621 (1892) (“decisive” weight “in case of ambiguity”); Jacobs v. Prichard , 223 U. S. 200 , 214 (1912) (referring to the “rule which gives strength” to official interpretations if “ambiguity exist[s]”). So even before the New Deal, a strand of this Court’s cases exemplified deference to executive constructions of ambiguous statutes. And then, as I show in the text, the New Deal arrived and deference surged—creating the “present law” that the APA “restated.”

7  The majority says that I have “pluck[ed] out” Gray and Hearst , impliedly from a vast number of not-so-helpful cases. Ante , at 13, n. 3. It would make as much sense to say that a judge “plucked out” Universal Camera Corp. v. NLRB , 340 U. S. 474 (1951) , to discuss substantial-evidence review or “plucked out” Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Assn. of United States, Inc. v. State Farm Mut. Automobile Ins. Co. , 463 U. S. 29 (1983) , to discuss arbitrary-and-capricious review. Gray and Hearst , as noted above, were the leading cases about agency interpretations in the years before the APA’s enactment. But just to gild the lily, here are a number of other Supreme Court decisions from the five years prior to the APA’s enactment that were of a piece: United States v. Pierce Auto Freight Lines, Inc. , 327 U. S. 515 , 536 (1946); ICC v. Parker , 326 U. S. 60 , 65 (1945); Federal Security Administrator v. Quaker Oats Co. , 318 U. S. 218 , 227–228 (1943). The real “pluck[ing]” offense is the majority’s—for taking a stray sentence from Hearst ( ante , at 13, n. 3) to suggest that both Hearst and Gray stand for the opposite of what they actually do.