Remove Axis Text & Ticks in ggplot2 (R) — Quick Examples

Last updated on August 22, 2025

Sometimes when making a plot in R, you may want a cleaner chart without axis labels or tick marks. In ggplot2, both axis text (the labels) and axis ticks (the small tick marks) can be removed or customized. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to remove axis text and ticks in ggplot2 for the x-axis and y-axis using theme() and element_blank(). Examples cover heatmaps and quick variations you can reuse in other charts.

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Load Packages

Let us first load tidyverse, a suite of R packages from RStudio. Let us also load gapminder R package as we will be using gapminder data to make the plot with x-axis ticks and text.

library(tidyverse)
library(gapminder)
theme_set(theme_bw(base_size=16))

Example Data

We’ll use a subset of the gapminder dataset for African countries and convert the year variable into a factor:

df1 <- gapminder |>
  filter(continent %in% c("Africa")) |>
  mutate(year=factor(year))

Example Plot With Axis Text and Ticks

Our example plot in this post is a heatmap of lifeExp over years for african countries. We can make heatmap from tidy data using ggplot2’s geom_tile() function. We have country on y-axis and year on x-axis and the values of heatmap are lifeExp.

df1 |>
  ggplot(aes(y=country, x=year, fill=lifeExp)) + 
  geom_tile() +
  scale_fill_viridis_c()

This default heatmap includes axis ticks (small black lines) and axis text labels (years on the x-axis, countries on the y-axis).

Remove Axis Text and Ticks in ggplot2

The theme() function lets us control axis appearance:

• Remove x-axis ticks: axis.ticks.x = element_blank()
• Remove x-axis text: axis.text.x = element_blank()

We can remove axis ticks and texts using the theme function in ggplot2. The theme() function in ggplot2 is a powerful function that allows users to customize various aspects of ggplot2 theme including the axis ticks and texts.

To remove x-axis ticks we specify the argument axis.ticks.x = element_blank() inside the theme(). And similarly to remove x-axis text, we specify axis.text.x = element_blank().

df1 |>
  ggplot(aes(y=country, x=year, fill=lifeExp)) + 
  geom_tile() +
  scale_fill_viridis_c() + 
  theme(axis.ticks.x = element_blank(),
        axis.text.x = element_blank())

You can also remove the y-axis text and ticks using axis.ticks.y and axis.text.

More Variations

Remove only axis ticks, keep text

p <- df1 |>
  ggplot(aes(y=country, x=year, fill=lifeExp)) + 
  geom_tile() +
  scale_fill_viridis_c()

p + theme(axis.ticks = element_blank())

Remove all axis text and ticks (both x and y)

p + 
  labs(title="Remove all axis text and ticks (both x and y axis)") +
  theme(
  axis.text  = element_blank(),
  axis.ticks = element_blank()
)
ggsave("Remove_all_axis_text_and_ticks_both_x_and_y_ggplot.png")

Remove axis titles but keep tick labels

p + theme(axis.title = element_blank())

FAQs

How do I remove only the x-axis labels in ggplot2?

Use axis.text.x = element_blank() inside theme().

What’s the difference between axis.text and axis.title?

axis.text controls tick labels; axis.title controls the axis title (e.g., “Year”). They’re independent.

How do I remove ticks but keep labels?

Use axis.ticks = element_blank() and leave axis.text unchanged.

Related Tutorials

• ggplot2 Hub — 35+ tutorials
• Heatmaps with ggplot2

Reference: ggplot2 theme() docs