---
name: Local navigation
slug: local-navigation
category: layout
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: Links contextual to where the reader is, showing the siblings and
  children of the current page rather than the whole site.
aliases:
  - name: local nav
    source: community
  - name: contextual navigation
    source: community
  - name: section navigation
    source: community
  - name: sub navigation
    source: community
tags:
  - navigation
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - global-navigation
    - tabs
    - table-of-contents
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - sidebar
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: Local Navigation Is a Valuable Orientation and Wayfinding Aid, NN/g
    url: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/local-navigation/
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: nav that changes with the section you are in
---

Local navigation changes when you change section; [global navigation](/global-navigation)
does not. A local nav lists the pages that live alongside and beneath the one you are on,
so its contents are a function of your position: the billing section shows plans, invoices
and payment methods, and the moment you move to the team section that list is replaced
wholesale. Together with a global nav and the utility links (account, help, sign out) that
usually sit in the far corner, it makes up the three part navigation family most products
converge on.

What it is actually for is depth. A global nav can only ever advertise a top tier, and
without a second control the tiers below it are invisible until you land in one. Local
navigation shows a reader the shape of the room they are standing in: how many siblings the
current page has, whether it has children, and roughly how much more there is. NN/g's
argument for it is that this
[orientation is separable from wayfinding](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/local-navigation/),
and that removing it forces every move within a section back through a landing page. It is
also the control that makes a section feel like a place rather than a URL prefix.

It is usually a vertical rail, and often the same [sidebar](/sidebar) component the global
nav uses on a wide window, which is exactly why the two get conflated in code. The test is
not where it is docked but whether the list survives a move to another section. Where a
section has only a handful of peers and they are genuinely alternate views of one thing,
[tabs](/tabs) do the same job in a horizontal strip. Where the "section" is a single long
document, the local nav collapses into a [table of contents](/table-of-contents) driven by
[scroll spy](/scroll-spy), and its current marker tracks a scroll position rather than a
page.

Two failure modes are worth watching for. The first is a rail that changes silently: if the
list is replaced when a reader moves and nothing says which section it now belongs to, the
change reads as the interface losing their place, so the rail should be headed by the name
of the section it describes. The second is duplication. Local navigation answers "what else
is here", [breadcrumbs](/breadcrumbs) answer "how did I get here", and a
[current page indicator](/current-page-indicator) answers "where am I". Building all three
to say the same thing is a common way to spend a quarter of the screen on redundancy.