How to Format a Dissertation in APA 7th Edition

APA 7 dissertation format is really two rulebooks, and knowing which one governs which page saves you a failed formatting review. The Publication Manual (7th ed.) sets the rules inside your chapters: margins, fonts, the five heading levels, tables, and the reference list. Your graduate school's template sets the rules the manual never wrote: the title page, the approval page, the table of contents, and how the front matter is numbered. This guide covers both layers, with the actual requirements from named graduate schools where they diverge, so you can tell an APA rule from a local one before your format reviewer does.

Which rules APA 7 actually sets

The Publication Manual was written for two document types: manuscripts submitted to journals and student papers for coursework. A dissertation is a third thing. It carries pages a journal manuscript never has (a committee title page, a dedication, a table of contents, lists of tables and figures), and on those pages the manual is silent. Graduate schools fill the silence with their own templates, style sheets, and format reviews.

The schools say this themselves. The University of Michigan-Dearborn's College of Education doctoral guidelines use APA 7 "for all matters of format" except the title page, the pagination of the front matter, and the top margins, which the college defines on its own. The University of Illinois goes further: its Graduate College thesis office states that "there is no reference style required by the Graduate College Thesis Office" at all, and leaves the choice of APA or another style to each department.

So the order of authority runs:

1. Your graduate school's dissertation template and format review requirements
2. Your department's style sheet, if it has one
3. The Publication Manual, 7th edition, for everything the first two leave alone

When this guide says "APA requires," that is layer three. Read your school's template first; the rest of this article tells you what applies wherever the template is silent.

Page setup: margins, font, and spacing

APA 7 asks for 1-inch margins on all sides and double-spacing throughout the text, including the reference list. Schools sometimes widen these (Illinois, for example, sets 1 inch as a minimum), so treat 1 inch as the floor.

The font question causes more anxiety than it should. APA 7 does not require Times New Roman. Section 2.19 of the manual (p. 44) names six acceptable options and asks only that the font be legible and used consistently:

Your school can narrow this list. Illinois allows any consistent 10- to 12-point body font, bans script and ornamental fonts, and lets footnotes drop as small as 7 point. If the template names a font, use that one.

Page numbers go in the top right corner of every page, and they belong in the document's header. The Justice Institute of British Columbia's APA guide puts it flatly: page numbers "must be added using the 'Header' feature in the word processor," never typed into the body of the page. A hand-typed number sits in the text flow and lands on the wrong page the moment a paragraph grows.

The title page comes from your graduate school

APA 7 defines two title pages, and a dissertation matches neither. The student version carries the bolded title, your name, affiliation, course number and name, instructor, and due date. The professional version swaps the course details for an author note and adds a running head. Both are one course-paper deep; a dissertation title page answers to a committee and a registrar.

Compare two real sets of requirements. Illinois requires the title to be the only bold text on the page, your name to match university records exactly, a standardized block naming the degree, major, and year of conferral, a list of committee members with their designations, and no page number. Franklin University's doctoral guide requires committee members to be listed in the order they appear on the approval form, each preceded by "Dr." with degrees left off. Neither layout appears anywhere in the Publication Manual.

The practical rule: download your school's title page template and fill it in. Building this page from an APA student-paper example is the single most commonly rejected page in a format review, because it is the page the manual never covered.

The running head deserves its own line here. APA 7 removed the running head from student papers; it survives on professional manuscripts, capped at 50 characters in capital letters. Whether your dissertation carries one is a school decision, and templates genuinely go both ways, so check rather than assume.

Front matter: the pages APA never defined

Abstract. The manual caps a journal manuscript's abstract at 250 words and says student papers usually skip the abstract entirely. A dissertation abstract is a different animal: your school requires it, places it, and sets its length. Write to the school's word limit, since the manual has no number for you here.

Table of contents. Journal articles have no table of contents, so the manual never wrote a format for one, and schools have filled the gap in genuinely incompatible ways. Franklin requires every Level 1, 2, and 3 heading, double-spaced, with each deeper level indented a further half inch. Illinois requires only chapter-level and first-level headings, page numbers aligned to the right margin with leader dots, and no front matter listed at all. Both are correct at their own institutions. There is no APA answer to appeal to; the template is the answer.

Page numbering. This is the sharpest divergence in the whole document. NC State's Graduate School numbers the front matter in lowercase roman numerals (the title page counts as i but shows no number) and restarts the body at arabic 1. Illinois uses arabic numerals from the title page onward: the title page counts as page 1 unnumbered, and the abstract begins at 2, or at 3 when a copyright page precedes it. Two flagship graduate schools, two incompatible systems. Find out which one yours uses before you build the document, because retrofitting section breaks into a finished 200-page file is an afternoon you do not want.

Heading levels: the part APA does settle

Inside the chapters, the manual takes over, and here the rules are exact. Sections 2.26 and 2.27, with Table 2.3, define five heading levels:

Chapter titles take Level 1. Franklin's guide spells out the convention most schools share: "Chapter 1: Introduction," "Chapter 2: Literature Review," and so on, each formatted as a Level 1 heading. This resolves a rule that confuses people coming from course papers: in a journal manuscript, the opening section takes no heading at all because the paper's title does that work. In a dissertation, the chapter heading does it instead, so "Chapter 1: Introduction" is written out where a course paper would have nothing.

A methodology chapter using the first four levels looks like this:

Chapter 3: Methodology <- Level 1

Research Design <- Level 2

Data Collection <- Level 2

Interview Protocol <- Level 3

Pilot interviews. The protocol was tested <- Level 4, text runs on with three participants before...

Two rules keep the hierarchy honest. Use the levels in order: a Level 3 heading directly under a Level 1 signals a missing layer, and format reviewers look for exactly that. And give a section either two or more subsections or none; a lone subsection means the split was unnecessary. Most dissertations never need Levels 4 and 5. If yours does, the indented, period-terminated, run-in format above is what they look like, and it reads better than it sounds.

Set the styles up in Word once

Every heading rule above should be configured exactly once, as a paragraph style, before Chapter 1 gets written. Map Word's built-in Heading 1 through Heading 5 styles to the five APA formats (Megan Krone, an academic writing coach and editor, demonstrates this exact setup for APA 7 dissertations: headings, reference formatting, and the automatic table of contents in one pass). The payoff is the table of contents: Word's References > Table of Contents generator reads the heading styles and builds the whole thing, page numbers and leader dots included. Text that was merely bolded by hand is invisible to it.

Three mechanical notes:

• The roman-to-arabic page number switch (if your school uses one) needs a section break: Layout > Breaks > Next Page at the start of Chapter 1, unlink the new section's header from the previous one, then restart numbering at 1 in the new format.
• References need a half-inch hanging indent, set as a paragraph format on the whole list. The walkthrough in how to create a hanging indent in Microsoft Word covers the dialog, and tab-and-space imitations of the indent collapse the first time the text reflows.
• Update the table of contents as the final act before submission (right-click > Update Field > entire table). Page numbers drift during editing, and a TOC that points five pages off reads as carelessness to a committee.

Google Docs can do the same job: its heading styles feed an automatic table of contents under Insert. The numbering-format switch is where Docs gets fiddly, and schools tend to publish their templates as Word files, so check what format your school distributes before committing to Docs for a 200-page document.

Tables, figures, and the reference list

APA 7 formats every table the same way: the table number ("Table 4") in bold, flush left, above the table; the title in italic Title Case on the next line; any notes below the body. Figures mirror the pattern with "Figure" in place of "Table." Number each series consecutively in the order first mentioned in the text, and mention every one (a table that never gets a callout should either get one or get cut). Franklin adds a requirement worth adopting even where it is optional: alt text on every table and figure, since the deposited PDF is a digital document that screen readers will meet.

Whether tables sit in the text near their callout or gather in an appendix is, once again, a school decision. The manual permits either for manuscripts; your template picks one.

The reference list follows pure APA 7, and it is the most mechanical part of the whole document. It starts on its own page under a centered, bold "References" heading. Every entry is double-spaced with a half-inch hanging indent. Order is alphabetical, letter by letter, with the tie-breaking rules covered in APA reference list order. Every source cited in the chapters appears in the list, and everything in the list is cited somewhere; a dissertation-length mismatch check is tedious by hand, which is an argument for running it chapter by chapter rather than once at the end. If your literature review leans on other dissertations, their entries have a format of their own, covered in how to cite a dissertation or thesis in APA 7, including the difference between a ProQuest-published dissertation and an unpublished one.

Common mistakes and how to avoid them

• Typing page numbers into the body of the page. They land wrong as soon as text reflows. Use the header, and use section breaks where the numbering style changes.
• Faking headings with bolded body text. The document looks right and behaves wrong: the TOC generator finds nothing, and every later heading edit is manual. Assign real heading styles.
• Building the title page from an APA student-paper example. The manual's title pages lack the committee, the degree block, and the registrar's conventions. This is the page your school's template exists for.
• Skipping heading levels because Level 3 "looks better" under a chapter title. Reviewers read the hierarchy, and a skipped level reads as a structural error even when the prose is fine.
• Hand-typing the dot leaders in the table of contents. It cannot survive edits. Generate the TOC from styles and update it before every submission.
• Treating the manual's silence as freedom. The front matter has rules; they are your school's, and the format review will apply them whether or not you read them.
• Submitting with a stale TOC. The chapters moved during revisions and the page numbers did not. Update the field last, after the final page-number-changing edit.

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