Skip to content

How to get the scroll position of an element in JavaScript

When you are building a user interface in the browser, you might have an element which can be scrolled, and it's a common need to know the horizontal and vertical scrolling it currently has.

THE AHA STACK MASTERCLASS

Now open with 50% off launch discount!

How can you do that?

Once you have the element, you can inspect its scrollLeft and scrollTop properties.

The 0, 0 position is always found in the top left corner, so any scrolling is relative to that.

Example:

const container = document.querySelector('. container')
container.scrollTop
container.scrollLeft

Those properties are read/write, so you can also set the scroll position:

const container = document.querySelector('. container')
container.scrollTop = 1000
container.scrollLeft = 1000


I wrote 20 books to help you become a better developer:

  • Astro Handbook
  • HTML Handbook
  • Next.js Pages Router Handbook
  • Alpine.js Handbook
  • HTMX Handbook
  • TypeScript Handbook
  • React Handbook
  • SQL Handbook
  • Git Cheat Sheet
  • Laravel Handbook
  • Express Handbook
  • Swift Handbook
  • Go Handbook
  • PHP Handbook
  • Python Handbook
  • Linux Commands Handbook
  • C Handbook
  • JavaScript Handbook
  • CSS Handbook
  • Node.js Handbook
...download them all now!

Related posts that talk about platform: