How to Make a Question Required in Google Forms

Updated July 2026 · 6 min read

Marking a question as required is the simplest way to guarantee you get an answer to something you actually need — a name, an email, a ticket count — before someone can submit your form. It's a single toggle, but it interacts with sections, branching logic, and sign-in settings in ways that aren't always obvious. This guide covers exactly how to turn it on, what respondents see when they try to skip a required field, and when required questions don't block submission at all.

How to make a question required

1. Click the question you want to make mandatory. This opens its full editing view with the answer type dropdown and options visible.
2. Look at the bottom-right corner of the question box. You'll see the word "Required" next to a small toggle switch.
3. Click the toggle to turn it on. It changes color to indicate it's active, and a red asterisk appears immediately after the question text, both in the editor and on the live form.
4. Repeat for any other question that needs an answer before submission — each question has its own independent Required toggle.

There's no bulk "make all required" button in Google Forms — you have to toggle each question individually, which is a useful forcing function to think about whether every question truly needs to be mandatory.

What respondents see when they skip a required question

If someone tries to submit the form without answering a required question, Google Forms doesn't let the submission go through. Instead, it scrolls to (or highlights) the unanswered question and shows a short red error message directly underneath it, such as "This is a required question." The respondent has to provide an answer — or in the case of multiple choice, select an option — before they can try submitting again. This happens instantly in the browser without a page reload, so respondents get immediate feedback rather than an error after the fact.

Required questions inside sections and branching logic

This is the part that trips people up most often: a required question only blocks submission if the respondent actually reaches it. If you've set up branching logic (using "Go to section based on answer") that routes a respondent past an entire section, any required questions inside that skipped section are simply never shown to them — and since they never see it, it can't block their submission either.

In practice, this means required + branching combinations work exactly like a normal conditional form: someone who answers "No" to "Are you bringing a guest?" and gets routed past the "Guest details" section will never be asked to fill in a required "Guest name" field inside that section, because they skip it entirely. This is the expected, correct behavior — it just surprises people who assume "required" means "always required no matter what."

Requiring sign-in instead of question-by-question

The per-question Required toggle controls individual answers, but it's a separate thing from requiring the respondent to be signed in at all. If you want to guarantee you know who submitted each response — for example, to enforce one response per person, or to restrict a form to people inside your organization — open the gear icon and go to the General tab, then turn on Restrict to [organization] users or the "Collect email addresses" option, depending on what's available for your account type. This is a form-level gate that happens before anyone reaches the questions at all, distinct from marking any specific question mandatory.

Best practices: don't make everything required

It's tempting to mark every question required so you never get incomplete data, but that approach usually backfires. Every required field is one more thing standing between a respondent and finishing your form — if any single required question feels intrusive, confusing, or simply not applicable to them, they may abandon the form rather than push through it. A more effective approach:

• Require only what you can't proceed without — typically an identifying field like name or email, and whatever core piece of information the form exists to collect.
• Leave optional detail questions unmarked — a "comments" or "anything else we should know" field rarely needs to be required, since forcing an answer often produces low-quality filler text anyway.
• Reconsider required multiple-choice questions where "none of the above" or "not applicable" isn't an available option — a required question with no honest answer available is a common source of frustrated or inaccurate submissions.

Toggling required from a phone

The Required toggle is accessible on mobile too, though the desktop-oriented Forms editor can feel cramped on a small screen. Tap the question to open it, and the same Required switch appears at the bottom-right of the expanded question box — tap it exactly as you would click it on desktop. If you build forms primarily from your phone, a purpose-built app like FormMaker exposes the same toggle in a native, touch-sized control, which avoids the pinch-and-zoom that the standard mobile browser editor sometimes requires.

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