Google Forms required questions
Last updated September 2026 · ~6 minute read
Short answer: select the question in the editor and turn on the Required switch in its footer row. Google's own instruction is “To prevent people from not answering, turn on Required.” The question gains a red asterisk and the form gains the line “* Indicates required question”. Required means not empty — nothing more. It never checks that the answer is sensible.
That last sentence is the whole reason this page exists. Most forms that “have required questions and still collect garbage” were never broken: Required was doing exactly its job, and the job is smaller than people assume.
Turn Required on
- Open the form in the editor and click the question so its controls expand.
- In the footer row of the expanded question — the strip with the duplicate and delete icons — flip the Required switch on.
- Confirm a red asterisk now follows the question title.
- Check the top of the form: as soon as one question is required, the line “* Indicates required question” appears.
Google states it in one sentence on its Create a form page: “To prevent people from not answering, turn on Required.” Its question-editing page phrases the same step as “(Optional) To make it required for users to answer your question, turn Required on or off.” Both are current as of this update.
What a respondent actually sees
The asterisk convention is worth knowing precisely, because it ships on every published form: a red * after each required question's title, and the sentence “* Indicates required question” once per form. Neither string is documented on Google's help pages — we are describing the published form, not a spec.
Google does document the error a respondent gets, though not on any of the pages about building a form — it is on the respondent-facing troubleshooting page, Fix common errors while you respond to a Google Form: check for “any fields highlighted in red with the message ‘This is a required question,’ which indicate that they’re mandatory.” The same page documents the other moment the block fires — “If you can't click the ‘Next’ button to move to the next section, it means some required fields are incomplete” — which matters because it shows required is enforced when you try to leave a page, not only at Submit.
Required is not validation
This is the distinction that decides whether your data is usable. Required checks that a field is not empty. Validation checks that its contents are the right shape. They are different settings, and turning on the first does nothing for the second.
Concretely: make a Short answer question titled “Work email address” required. A respondent in a hurry types x and submits. The form accepts it. One character is not empty, so Required is satisfied, and you have a row in your spreadsheet with a perfectly valid-looking mandatory answer that is worth nothing.
To reject that, you need response validation — a rule that the text must contain an
@, or match a pattern, or fall in a numeric range. That is a separate control with its own
custom error text, and it is covered properly in
Google Forms data validation. Pair the two: Required makes
someone answer, validation makes the answer usable.
Required in a grid is a different control
Multiple choice grid and checkbox grid questions do not use the plain Required toggle to enforce per-row answers. They have their own option, and Google spells the behaviour out on its response validation page:
“To make sure responders choose an option from each column, turn on ‘Require a response in each row.’ If they don't, they get an error message and can't continue.”
The difference matters. The plain Required toggle on a grid treats the grid as one question. Require a response in each row enforces the answer row by row — a respondent cannot rate three of five items and move on. If you built a five-row satisfaction grid and only flipped Required, you will receive partially filled grids and they will submit cleanly.
Required and branching: not documented
A fair question: if branching routes a respondent past a section, are the required questions inside it still enforced? Google's branching documentation says nothing about this. We are not going to guess at it — what can be assembled from what Google does publish, labelled as the reading it is, is in required vs optional. Build a throwaway form with a required question inside a branch, route yourself around it, and watch what happens before you depend on the behaviour.
When not to make a question required
Required is cheap to switch on, which is exactly why it gets over-applied. A required field that a respondent cannot answer honestly does not produce complete data — it produces junk data, because the respondent's only two options are to invent something or to abandon the form. Leave these optional:
- Optional demographics — age, gender, income, ethnicity. People decline these for real reasons, and forcing them costs you the whole response, not just that field.
- Anything a respondent may legitimately not know — an order number they no longer have, a date they cannot recall, a policy reference from a letter they binned.
- Fields that do not apply to everyone — “company name” on a form that also serves individuals. Either make it optional or branch so only the relevant people see it.
- Long free-text boxes — a mandatory paragraph is one of the most reliable ways to lose a respondent at the last screen.
The test is simple: if a truthful person could reasonably have no answer, the field should not be required.
Which control do you want?
| You want… | Use |
|---|---|
| No blank answer on a question | The Required toggle on that question |
| An answer in the right format | Response validation (separate setting) |
| Every row of a grid answered | Require a response in each row |
| Both: answered, and answered properly | Required and response validation together |
| The question only shown to some people | Section branching, then Required inside it |
| Many questions made required at once | Forms+ → select questions → Actions → Mark required |
Catch the fields you forgot to require
Forms+ on iPhone and iPad audits a form before you publish it — a PRO feature. Leave an email or phone field optional and it flags “Key contact field is optional” with a one-tap Make required fix. Bulk Edit marks a whole batch of questions required in one go. Both work on your real Google Forms and your own Google account.
Get Forms+ free on the App StoreFrequently asked questions
Does Google Forms mark required questions with an asterisk?
Yes. Every published form with at least one required question shows a red asterisk after that question's title and the line “* Indicates required question” near the top. Google's help pages do not document this convention, but it is visible on every live form.
Does Required check that the answer is correct?
No. Required only checks that the field is not empty. A required Short answer question accepts the single character x. To constrain the shape of an answer — an email address, a number in a range, a pattern — you need response validation, which is a separate setting.
Are required questions enforced in a section a respondent skips?
Google's branching documentation says nothing about how a required question behaves in a section that branching routes a respondent past. Rather than guess, build a test form with a required question inside a branch, route yourself around it, and watch what happens before you rely on it.