Quick reference

Basic usage

Setting the background color

Control the background color of an element using the bg-{color} utilities.

<button class="bg-indigo-500 ...">
  Save changes
</button>

Changing the opacity

Control the opacity of an element’s background color using the color opacity modifier.

<button class="bg-sky-500/100 ..."></button>
<button class="bg-sky-500/75 ..."></button>
<button class="bg-sky-500/50 ..."></button>

You can use any value defined in your opacity scale, or use arbitrary values if you need to deviate from your design tokens.

<div class="bg-sky-500/[.06] ..."></div>

Applying conditionally

Hover, focus, and other states

Tailwind lets you conditionally apply utility classes in different states using variant modifiers. For example, use hover:bg-cyan-600 to only apply the bg-cyan-600 utility on hover.

<button class="bg-cyan-500 hover:bg-cyan-600 ...">Subscribe</button>

For a complete list of all available state modifiers, check out the Hover, Focus, & Other States documentation.

Breakpoints and media queries

You can also use variant modifiers to target media queries like responsive breakpoints, dark mode, prefers-reduced-motion, and more. For example, use md:bg-green-500 to apply the bg-green-500 utility at only medium screen sizes and above.

<button class="bg-blue-500 md:bg-green-500 ...">Subscribe</button>

To learn more, check out the documentation on Responsive Design, Dark Mode and other media query modifiers.

Using custom values

Customizing your theme

By default, Tailwind makes the entire default color palette available as background colors. You can customize your color palette by editing theme.colors or theme.extend.colors in your tailwind.config.js file.

module.exports = {
  theme: {
    extend: {
      colors: {
        'regal-blue': '#243c5a',
      },
    }
  }
}

Alternatively, you can customize just your background colors by editing theme.backgroundColor or theme.extend.backgroundColor in your tailwind.config.js file.

Learn more about customizing the default theme in the theme customization documentation.

Arbitrary values

If you need to use a one-off color value that doesn’t make sense to include in your theme, use square brackets to generate a property on the fly using any arbitrary value.

<p class="bg-[#50d71e]">
  <!-- ... -->
</p>

Learn more about arbitrary value support in the arbitrary values documentation.