Turn Drive labels on or off

Supported editions for this feature: Frontline Starter and Frontline Standard; Business Standard and Business Plus; Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus; Education Standard and Education Plus; Essentials, Enterprise Essentials, and Enterprise Essentials Plus; G Suite Business.  Compare your edition

Starting April 2024, the organization-wide labels on/off setting described on this page will be replaced with a per-label control. After the change takes effect:

• If your current setting is Turn labels on, all labels in your organization will be set to on, resulting in no change in behavior.
• If your current setting is Turn labels off, labels will be set to off unless the label is used in an active label-based rule. Labels that are used in active rules will be set to on, which will make the labels visible to users based on the current label permissions.

If you don’t want labels that are used in active rules to be user-visible, take one of the following actions before April 2024:

• Remove the label from any active rules so that the label will be set to off (not user visible).
• Update label permissions to limit label visibility when the label is set to on.

To create and apply labels to files in your organization, an administrator must turn on labels. When labels are turned on:

• Admins with the Manage Labels privilege can create and manage labels. Tip: If you want to let certain people manage metadata without any other admin privileges, create a custom administrator role for just the Manage Labels privilege.
• Users with edit access to a file can apply published labels and edit the field values for those labels.
• Users with view access to a file can view labels applied to the file, but not apply labels or edit field values.
• Users with any access to a file can search Drive by labels or fields.

Turn on Drive labels for your organization

1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

   Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

2. In the Admin console, go to Menu  AppsGoogle WorkspaceDrive and Docs.
3. Click Labels.
4. Select Turn Labels On.
5. Click Save.

Changes can take up to 24 hours but typically happen more quickly. Learn more

Next steps

Now that you turned on labels, you need to:

1. Create labels for your organization to use.
2. Teach your users how to apply labels and use them to search for files.

What happens when you turn off labels

If you turn off labels after labels were created:

• Labels and their corresponding fields are hidden and can’t be created, applied to files, or used for search. You can edit existing labels in the labels manager.
• Any labels that were previously created will remain. If you turn labels back on, previously created labels will be usable again.
• Label-based Data loss prevention (DLP) rules and Vault retention rules work the same as when labels were turned on.