Window: load event

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 load event is fired when the whole page has loaded, including all dependent resources such as stylesheets, scripts (including async, deferred, and module scripts), iframes, and images, except those that are loaded lazily. This is in contrast to DOMContentLoaded, which is fired as soon as the page DOM has been loaded, without waiting for resources to finish loading.

This event is not cancelable and does not bubble.

Note: All events named load will not propagate to Window, even with bubbles initialized to true. To catch load events on the window, that load event must be dispatched directly to the window.

Note: The load event that is dispatched when the main document has loaded is dispatched on the window, but has two mutated properties: target is document, and path is undefined. These two properties are mutated due to legacy conformance.

To avoid running a script before the DOM it manipulates has been fully constructed, you can place the script at the end of the document body, immediately before the closing </body> tag, without wrapping it in an event listener. You should usually only use the load event to wait for external resources, such as images or deferred scripts, to load.

Syntax

Use the event name in methods like addEventListener(), or set an event handler property.

addEventListener("load", (event) => { })

onload = (event) => { }

Event type

A generic Event.

Examples

Log a message when the page is fully loaded:

window.addEventListener("load", (event) => {
  console.log("page is fully loaded");
});

The same, but using the onload event handler property:

window.onload = (event) => {
  console.log("page is fully loaded");
};

Live example

HTML

html

<div class="controls">
  <button id="reload" type="button">Reload</button>
</div>

<div class="event-log">
  <label for="eventLog">Event log:</label>
  <textarea
    readonly
    class="event-log-contents"
    rows="8"
    cols="30"
    id="eventLog"></textarea>
</div>

body {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-areas: "control log";
}

.controls {
  grid-area: control;
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
  justify-content: center;
}

.event-log {
  grid-area: log;
}

.event-log-contents {
  resize: none;
}

label,
button {
  display: block;
}

#reload {
  height: 2rem;
}

JavaScript

const log = document.querySelector(".event-log-contents");
const reload = document.querySelector("#reload");

reload.addEventListener("click", () => {
  log.textContent = "";
  setTimeout(() => {
    window.location.reload(true);
  }, 200);
});

window.addEventListener("load", (event) => {
  log.textContent += "load\n";
});

document.addEventListener("readystatechange", (event) => {
  log.textContent += `readystate: ${document.readyState}\n`;
});

document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", (event) => {
  log.textContent += `DOMContentLoaded\n`;
});

Result

Specifications

Specification
UI Events # event-type-load
HTML # delay-the-load-event

Browser compatibility

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This page was last modified on ⁨Sep 11, 2025⁩ by MDN contributors.

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