How do I remove a label from an email in the Gmail iPhone app?

Last reviewed: October 22, 2026 · Markdown version

Touch and hold the email, tap More at the top right, then Change labels, untick the label and tap Done. Google's iPhone and iPad steps have no section called "remove a label"; the untick happens inside the steps for moving an email to another label, which read "Touch and hold one or more emails", "tap More and then Change labels", "Uncheck the boxes next to the current labels" (Create & manage labels in Gmail (iPhone & iPad), read 22 October 2026). Choosing no new label before Done is how we read the route to removing one and adding nothing.

What happens to the email

In our reading, nothing beyond losing the tag. Google opens the same page with "Labels are different from folders", and the Change labels steps say nothing about the inbox or Trash, so an email that was in the inbox stays there. The one action that strips every label at once is deleting the email: "When you delete an email, it’s removed from every label and your inbox" (the iPhone labels page above).

The steps are written for "one or more emails", so a batch that shares a label can be cleared in one pass.

Removing the label from every email

If the label itself has to go, that is a different setting: Menu, Settings, Inbox customizations, Labels, select the label, tap Delete (the iPhone labels page above). Google's iPhone page does not say what deleting a label does to the emails that carry it. What a delete does to the mail, from Google's developer reference, is on editing Gmail labels.

When the label keeps coming back

A label that reappears on new mail is being applied by a rule. On iPhone, the app's own rule lives under the same Labels screen: Google's "Label emails automatically" steps add a "From" criterion to a label, and note that "New messages that match your criteria are automatically labeled." The page gives the steps to add that criterion but not to remove it (the iPhone labels page above), so open the label there and look at what it lists. The other source is a Gmail filter with an Apply the label action, which is managed from a computer; deleting a Gmail filter has the steps.

The same job elsewhere

On a computer: tick the email, click Labels at the top, and "Uncheck the current label" (Create & manage labels in Gmail, read 22 October 2026). Google adds a detail that matters for long threads: with conversation view on, "the label applies only to the existing messages, not to new replies."
On Android: Google's Android steps offer "Label as", with checkboxes, and "Move to" (Create & manage labels in Gmail (Android), read 22 October 2026). Unticking in Label as is our reading of the Android equivalent; the page does not spell out removal.