How to Change Legend Position in ggplot2 (With Examples)

by Tutor Aspire February 17, 2016

You can use the following syntax to specify the position of a ggplot2 legend:

theme(legend.position = "right")

The following examples show how to use this syntax in practice with the built-in iris dataset in R.

You can directly tell ggplot2 to place the legend on the “top”, “right”, “bottom” or “left” side of the plot.

For example, here’s how to place the legend on the top of the plot:

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(iris, aes(x=Sepal.Length, y=Sepal.Width, color=Species)) +
       geom_point() +
       theme(legend.position = "top")

Example of ggplot2 title on top of plot

And here’s how to place the legend on the bottom of the plot:

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(iris, aes(x=Sepal.Length, y=Sepal.Width, color=Species)) +
       geom_point() +
       theme(legend.position = "bottom")

Example of title on bottom of ggplot2

You can also specify the exact (x, y) coordinates to place the legend on the inside of the plot.

For example, here’s how to place the legend inside the top right corner:

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(iris, aes(x=Sepal.Length, y=Sepal.Width, color=Species)) +
       geom_point() +
       theme(legend.position = c(.9, .9))

And here’s how to place the legend inside the bottom right corner:

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(iris, aes(x=Sepal.Length, y=Sepal.Width, color=Species)) +
       geom_point() +
       theme(legend.position = c(.9, .1))

You can also remove the legend from a plot in ggplot2 entirely by specifying legend.position=”none” as follows:

library(ggplot2)

ggplot(iris, aes(x=Sepal.Length, y=Sepal.Width, color=Species)) +
       geom_point() +
       theme(legend.position = "none")