How to Show Gridlines on Matplotlib Plots

By default, Matplotlib does not display gridlines on plots. However, you can use the matplotlib.pyplot.grid() function to easily display and customize gridlines on a plot.

This tutorial shows an example of how to use this function in practice.

Basic Scatterplot in Matplotlib

The following code shows how to create a simple scatterplot using Matplotlib:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

#create data
x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
y = [20, 25, 49, 88, 120]

#create scatterplot of data
plt.scatter(x, y)
plt.show()

Add Gridlines to Both Axes

To add gridlines to the plot, we can simply use the plt.grid(True) command:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

#create data
x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
y = [20, 25, 49, 88, 120]

#create scatterplot of data with gridlines
plt.scatter(x, y)
plt.grid(True)
plt.show()

Add Gridlines to Only One Axis

We can use the axis argument to only add gridlines to the x-axis:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

#create data
x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
y = [20, 25, 49, 88, 120]

#create scatterplot of data with gridlines
plt.scatter(x, y)
plt.grid(axis='x')
plt.show()

Or only the y-axis:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

#create data
x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
y = [20, 25, 49, 88, 120]

#create scatterplot of data with gridlines
plt.scatter(x, y)
plt.grid(axis='y')
plt.show()

Customize Gridlines

We can also customize the appearance of the gridlines using the plt.rc() function:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

#create data
x = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
y = [20, 25, 49, 88, 120]

#create scatterplot of data with gridlines
plt.rc('grid', linestyle=':', color='red', linewidth=2)
plt.scatter(x, y)
plt.grid(True)
plt.show()

You can find a complete list of ways to customize the gridlines in the Matplotlib documentation.

Additional Resources

The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in Matplotlib:

How to Remove Ticks from Matplotlib Plots
How to Change Font Sizes on a Matplotlib Plot