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HTMLElement: offsetParent property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since ⁨July 2015⁩.

The HTMLElement.offsetParent read-only property returns a reference to the element which is the closest (nearest in the containment hierarchy) positioned ancestor element.

A positioned ancestor might be:

  • a containing block for absolutely-positioned elements
  • an element with a different effective zoom value (that is, the product of all zoom scales of its parents) from this element
  • td, th, table in case the element itself is static positioned.

If there is no positioned ancestor element, the body is returned.

Note: offsetParent returns null in the following situations:

  • The element or any ancestor has the display property set to none.
  • The element has the position property set to fixed (Firefox returns <body>).
  • The element is <body> or <html>.

offsetParent is useful because offsetTop and offsetLeft are relative to its padding edge.

Value

An object reference to the element in which the current element is offset.

Specifications

Specification
CSSOM View Module>
# dom-htmlelement-offsetparent>

Browser compatibility

Desktop Mobile
Chrome Edge Firefox Opera Safari Chrome Android Firefox for Android Opera Android Safari on IOS Samsung Internet WebView Android WebView on iOS
offsetParent 1 12 1 8 3 18 4 10.1 1 1.0 4.4 1

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https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/offsetParent