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Document: firstElementChild property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. Its been available across browsers since April 2018.

The Document.firstElementChild read-only property returns the document's first child Element, or null if there are no child elements.

For HTML documents, this is usually the only child, the root <html> element.

See Element.firstElementChild for the first child element of specific elements within a document.

In this article

Value

An Element object, or null.

Examples

js
document.firstElementChild;
// returns the root <html> element, the only child of the document

Specifications

Specification
DOM
# ref-for-dom-parentnode-firstelementchild

Browser compatibility

See also

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This page was last modified on Oct 30, 2025 by MDN contributors.

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  1. Document Object Model (DOM)
  2. Document
  3. Constructor
    1. Document()
  4. Instance properties
    1. activeElement
    2. activeViewTransition
    3. adoptedStyleSheets
    4. alinkColor
    5. all
    6. anchors
    7. applets
    8. bgColor
    9. body
    10. characterSet
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    12. children
    13. compatMode
    14. contentType
    15. cookie
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    17. customElementRegistry
    18. defaultView
    19. designMode
    20. dir
    21. doctype
    22. documentElement
    23. documentURI
    24. domain
    25. embeds
    26. featurePolicy
    27. fgColor
    28. firstElementChild
    29. fonts
    30. forms
    31. fragmentDirective
    32. fullscreen
    33. fullscreenElement
    34. fullscreenEnabled
    35. head
    36. hidden
    37. images
    38. implementation
    39. lastElementChild
    40. lastModified
    41. lastStyleSheetSet
    42. linkColor
    43. links
    44. location
    45. pictureInPictureElement
    46. pictureInPictureEnabled
    47. plugins
    48. pointerLockElement
    49. preferredStyleSheetSet
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    53. rootElement
    54. scripts
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    58. styleSheetSets
    59. timeline
    60. title
    61. URL
    62. visibilityState
    63. vlinkColor
    64. xmlEncoding
    65. xmlVersion
  5. Static methods
    1. parseHTML()
    2. parseHTMLUnsafe()
  6. Instance methods
    1. adoptNode()
    2. append()
    3. ariaNotify()
    4. browsingTopics()
    5. caretPositionFromPoint()
    6. caretRangeFromPoint()
    7. clear()
    8. close()
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    16. createEvent()
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    29. evaluate()
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    31. exitFullscreen()
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    33. exitPointerLock()
    34. getAnimations()
    35. getElementById()
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    38. getElementsByTagName()
    39. getElementsByTagNameNS()
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    56. releaseCapture()
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    60. startViewTransition()
    61. write()
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  7. Events
    1. afterscriptexecute
    2. beforescriptexecute
    3. DOMContentLoaded
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    5. fullscreenerror
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    8. prerenderingchange
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    13. scrollsnapchanging
    14. securitypolicyviolation
    15. selectionchange
    16. visibilitychange
  8. Inheritance
    1. Node
    2. EventTarget
  9. Related pages for DOM
    1. AbortController
    2. AbortSignal
    3. AbstractRange
    4. Attr
    5. CDATASection
    6. CharacterData
    7. Comment
    8. CustomEvent
    9. DOMError
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    11. DOMImplementation
    12. DOMParser
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    15. DocumentType
    16. Element
    17. Event
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    20. MutationObserver
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    23. Node
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    28. Range
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    31. Text
    32. TreeWalker
    33. XMLDocument
    34. XPathEvaluator
    35. XPathExpression
    36. XPathResult
    37. XSLTProcessor
  10. Guides
    1. Anatomy of the DOM
    2. Attribute reflection
    3. Selection and traversal on the DOM tree
    4. Building and updating the DOM tree
    5. Working with events
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