How do I add labels in Gmail?

Last reviewed: September 23, 2026 · Markdown version

A label is a tag you put on a message, and Gmail lets you create up to 5,000 of them. That ceiling is printed on Google's own page (Create & manage labels in Gmail, read 23 September 2026), and it says something about the design: labels are meant to be cheap. You are not supposed to agonise over one.

Creating one

On the web, Google's steps are short: on the left, next to "Labels", click Create new label, type a name, and click Create. The same page offers one option worth knowing about at creation time: you can "include your label in another label" by ticking Nest label under, which is how you get Work → Invoices rather than two unrelated tags.

In the Gmail app on iPhone the list sits behind Menu at the top left, with Create new under "Labels". Google's iPhone instructions cover creating, renaming, deleting and applying labels; nesting and colours appear only in its computer instructions (Create & manage labels in Gmail, iPhone steps, read 23 September 2026).

Applying one to mail you already have

Tick the messages, then click Labels at the top and choose one. The useful habit is to run a search first and label the results, rather than hunting message by message: from:, subject: and category:promotions are all on Google's operator list (Refine searches in Gmail, read 23 September 2026), and a label applied to a search you have just read is a label you have already checked.

Colour, and the second published number

Colour lives under the same More button beside a label's name that you use to edit or remove it. Google publishes a ceiling here too: "You can create up to 100 custom colors for your Gmail labels." In practice four or five colours carry all the meaning a colour can carry; past that it is decoration.

The thing to know before you build a system

Google's page says it in one line: "Labels are different from folders." One message can carry several — the iPhone steps tell you to "Check the boxes next to the labels you want to add" — and the page spells out the other direction too: "When you delete an email, it's removed from every label and your inbox." That flexibility is why labels suit real mail better than a folder tree, and it is also why a label on its own never reduces anything. What labels are actually good for is a different question from this one, and worth reading before you make forty of them.

Making them apply themselves

Labelling by hand does not keep up for long. The standing version is a filter, which Google describes as a way to "manage your incoming mail" and "send email to a label" (Create rules to filter your emails, read 23 September 2026). Build it from a search you trust, and new mail that matches arrives already labelled. How filters work, and what they cannot do.

Where we fit

Labels file mail. They do not reduce it, and an inbox that seems to need thousands of labels usually needs fewer senders instead. Adinand Email Cleaner groups Gmail by sender so you can see who is actually filling it, delete in bulk by sender, and turn the recurring cases into auto-trash rules — which are real Gmail filters, created through Gmail's own API and running inside Gmail itself, so they keep working even if you delete the app. Three of them on the free tier, unlimited on Pro.