How to Use Rulers and Guides in Figma

Guides you drag from a ruler stay on the canvas until you delete them. Remove one in any of three ways: drag it back onto the ruler, click it and press Delete, or right-click it and pick Remove guide. Guides can sit on the canvas or on a frame.

If the red lines you see appear only while you hover, they aren't guides. They're Figma's distance measurements, and they disappear when you let go of ⌥ / Alt.

Select a layer, hold ⌥ on Mac or Alt on Windows, and hover over another layer. Figma draws red lines with the distances in pixels. For layers nested inside frames or groups, hold ⌘⌥ / Ctrl + Alt instead so Figma measures to the nested layer rather than its parent.

Dragging a guide from a top-level frame while holding ⌥ / Alt shows its distance in px as you move it, which helps you place guides at exact margins.

• Something is on top. Masks, locked layers and low-opacity fills that overlap the layers can block the measurement. Hide or move them, or select from the Layers panel.
• The number looks wrong. Figma measures to bounding boxes, not visible edges. Strokes, text and polygons can have a bounding box that doesn't match the edge you see.
• The layer is nested. Use ⌘⌥ / Ctrl + Alt to reach inside frames and groups.

Figma's help center documents only pixels, and describes no setting for inches or centimetres. For print work, convert at 72 pixels per inch, which is the resolution Figma exports at 1x: 8.5 in is 612 px. Figma frame sizes shows how that works for a US Letter page.

Rulers and guides work alongside snapping and layout guides. See Figma snapping if layers won't settle on a guide, how to add a grid for column layouts, and the full Figma keyboard shortcuts list.