APA 7 requires one-inch margins on all sides. However, when working on a paper in Microsoft Word, you may notice the bottom margin appears larger than one inch. There's a good reason for this – it's called Widow/Orphan Control.
Widow/Orphan Control is a Word setting that prevents a single line of a paragraph from appearing alone at the top (a "widow") or bottom (an "orphan") of a page. Word enables this automatically, which can result in bottom margins that appear larger than one inch.
This is standard formatting behavior in professional documents, so we recommend leaving this setting as-is. But if you'd like to disable it, here's how:
Disable Widow/Orphan Control
- Highlight the paragraphs where you want to disable Widow/Orphan Control.
- Right-click the highlighted text.
- Click Paragraph.
- Click the Line and Page Breaks tab.
- Uncheck the Widow/Orphan control box.
- Click OK.
Your bottom margin will now match the rest of your margins.