How to Round Corners in Figma: Quick Shape Tips

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Corner radius lives in the Design tab of Figma’s right sidebar, a few fields below fill and stroke. It rounds the spot where two straight edges meet, and it’s measured in pixels, not percentages. Frames, rectangles, polygons, and stars all accept it.

Figma moved the four corner controls directly into the properties panel in April 2025, under the name Inline corner radius. Small change. It saved a click on every shape that needed uneven corners, which adds up fast when you’re rebuilding a card component for the third time.

What Is Corner Radius in Figma

Figma stores the value as a single number on the shape itself, applied to all four corners the moment you draw it. Type 8, get 8 everywhere.

Two things trip people up early. The measurement is in density-independent pixels, so a percentage value won’t parse. And the field sits directly above the independent corners toggle, which is why so many people discover uneven corners by accident while reaching for the radius box.

Corner radius is also not corner smoothing. That’s a separate slider further down the panel, and it reshapes the curve rather than resizing it. More on that below.

Sketch and the open source Penpot both ship comparable fields in their own panels, with slightly different interface wording. Adobe XD had one too, though Adobe stopped selling it in 2023 and shipped the final release in December 2025, so it isn’t really a live comparison anymore.

How to Round Corners in Figma

Select the shape, type a value into the corner radius field, done.

1. Click the rectangle, frame, polygon, or star you want to change
2. Open the Design tab in the right sidebar if it isn’t already visible
3. Find the corner radius field, marked with a small square icon
4. Type a pixel value, or drag the circular handle that appears on hover
5. Press Enter to lock the value across all four corners

Select several shapes at once and the field shows a mixed value state instead of a number. That’s Figma telling you the shapes don’t currently agree on a radius, not an error.

Dragging the handle feels looser and works fine when you’re exploring. Typing a number is what you want the moment a shape is headed into a component library, because you can repeat it exactly six months later.

How to Round Individual Corners in Figma

Click Independent corners and the single field splits into four, one per corner.

• Enter a different pixel value in each field
• Apply a variable to any single field instead of a fixed number
• Rectangles and frames only, so polygons and stars are out

Once you unlock one corner, Figma treats the shape as having independent corners permanently, even when three of the four values happen to match. Slightly annoying, but consistent.

Adjusting One Corner with the Modifier Key

You don’t have to open the sidebar at all. Figma’s help documentation confirms that holding a modifier key while dragging a single corner handle on the canvas rounds just that corner.

• On Mac, hold Option while dragging the corner handle
• On Windows, hold Alt

Rectangles only. It follows the same logic as most of Figma’s other keyboard shortcuts, where the modifier narrows the scope of an action instead of starting a new one.

The quirk: the modifier rounds only the first corner you touch. Release the key and press it again before you go after a second corner.

What Is Corner Smoothing in Figma

Further down the same panel there’s a slider that reshapes a rounded corner into a continuous curve. Designers call the result a squircle.

Apple introduced the shape on June 10, 2013, when iOS 7 replaced the old circular-arc app icon with a smoother outline, a bit of history Figma’s own engineering blog covers.

The slider runs from 0 to 100 percent. At 0 percent you get a standard rounded corner, mathematically identical to plain corner radius. At 60 percent you match the curve Apple uses on iOS app icons, a number Figma’s engineering team confirmed in their 2018 writeup on the feature. Push it to 100 percent and the smoothing extends as far along each edge as the shape allows.

Underneath, the shape is a superellipse built from short Bezier segments rather than one circular arc, so there’s never a sharp mathematical transition at the corner point. This is the same curve that now anchors Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for iOS app icon design.

Corner Radius vs Corner Smoothing: Which One to Use

Plain radius handles buttons, cards, and form inputs, anywhere a familiar rounded look is what people expect. Smoothing earns its place on app icons and brand marks, or anything that needs to read as organic or iOS-native.

Smoothing costs you something at handoff, though. The curve has no native equivalent in plain CSS border-radius, so reproducing it on the web needs an external formula.

If you want to preview the flat, non-smoothed version before handing anything to a developer, run the values through a standalone CSS border-radius generator and compare them side by side.

My default: if the shape is going to be inspected in Dev Mode and turned into code without extra tooling, use plain corner radius and skip the argument entirely.

Which Shapes Support Corner Radius in Figma

Figma’s help documentation limits native support to frames, rectangles, polygons, and stars. Nested frames inside auto layout count as frames, so those work too.

What doesn’t work the same way is a shorter list. Lines have no corners to round. Paths drawn with the pen tool need point-by-point editing. Groups don’t hold the property at all, since it lives on the shape inside rather than the wrapper.

Images are a nice edge case. Drop one into a rectangle and it inherits that rectangle’s radius through the fill, which is why cropped photos in a design file come out rounded without anyone setting a radius on the image itself.

Building a frame from scratch for the first time? This guide on building a frame in Figma covers the same right sidebar panel referenced throughout this article.

When Corner Radius Does Not Apply in Figma

Radius fails in fairly predictable ways. Knowing the conditions upfront saves a lot of clicking around wondering why nothing changed.

Pen Tool and Vector Edit Mode Limits

Rectangles created or edited with the pen tool may not expose the standard corner radius field at all, according to Figma’s help documentation.

• Double-click the shape, or press Enter, to open vector edit mode
• Select the individual point that needs rounding
• Adjust the radius in the right sidebar, or drag the icon left to reduce and right to increase

Working point by point is slow. It’s also the only route available once a shape has left the standard rectangle path behind.

Auto Layout Overrides

Nested auto layout frames can visually override or clip a child shape’s radius, depending on how padding and clipping are set on the parent. A shape that looks perfectly rounded on its own canvas can turn up squared off after you drop it into a stack, and that catches almost everyone setting up auto layout the first time.

Before you troubleshoot anything deeper, check whether the parent frame’s clip content setting is cutting off the rounded edge, and whether the radius value itself got reset when the shape moved.

One more behavior that looks like a bug but isn’t: set a radius larger than half the shape’s shortest side and you get a full pill shape. That’s expected.

Corner Radius on Components and Instances

The main component defines the default, and every instance inherits it. You can override the uniform radius on an instance, but Figma locks individual corner values once a shape sits inside one.

For a design system this matters more than it sounds. A button component whose instances disagree about corner values renders inconsistently on every screen that uses it, and teams that ignore the rule end up auditing dozens of instances by hand later.

Setting radius on the main component gives every instance the same starting value, lets one update propagate across the file, and forces exceptions to be deliberate.

Overriding per instance has its place. It lets a single instance break from the system on purpose (a one-off promotional card, say), and uniform overrides are easy to apply and just as easy to revert. Individual corner values stay locked, so you’re only ever touching the uniform field. The real risk is drift, because overrides quietly fall out of sync with the main component when nobody writes them down.

Still setting up your first component library? Start with this walkthrough on using components in Figma, which goes deeper into the inheritance model.

Locking radius on the main component and reserving instance overrides for genuine exceptions is the safer habit, and it’s covered further in this guide to Figma component best practices.

How to Apply a Variable to Corner Radius in Figma

Any of the four corner radius fields can bind to a shared value through Apply variable.

1. Select the shape and open the corner radius field in the right sidebar
2. Click the variable icon next to the field
3. Choose an existing number variable, or create one from the same panel
4. Repeat per corner if the shape uses independent corners

Figma introduced variables in beta at its Config conference in June 2023, finally giving teams a native place to store values like radius, spacing, and color as one reusable source.

The payoff is straightforward. Update the bound variable once and every shape referencing it changes across the whole file, no shape-by-shape editing.

Dropbox’s design systems team beta-tested Figma variables for their own token system shortly after launch, according to Figma’s design systems publication. Supernova’s State of Design Tokens 2024 report later found that 69.8 percent of design teams already use Figma variables inside their design systems.

Binding radius to a variable instead of a hardcoded number is what keeps a component library from drifting the next time a brand refresh changes the standard corner value. And a brand refresh always changes the standard corner value.

Teams building this out for the first time can follow this Figma variables guide for the full setup. This design system tutorial shows how radius tokens sit alongside color and spacing in a wider token architecture.

How Corner Radius Exports to Code in Dev Mode

Dev Mode reads the radius on a selected shape and outputs a standard CSS border-radius declaration.

Dev Mode launched in beta at the same June 2023 Config where variables appeared, and it became the default way developers inspect a file. More than a third of Figma’s weekly active users are developers, a figure Figma’s product team shared at Config 2023, which is why what survives the export matters as much as it does.

Smoothing doesn’t survive. As noted earlier, there’s no native equivalent in plain CSS border-radius, so the exported code falls back to a plain circular arc every time.

Getting the actual squircle onto a live site usually means adding a small external library that generates the same superellipse path as an SVG shape, because border-radius alone can’t draw it and cross-browser support for a native alternative is still thin.

The spec has moved, though. The CSS Working Group’s proposal is past draft-discussion: a native corner-shape property for true superellipse curves has shipped as an experimental, non-Baseline feature in Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers. Safari and Firefox don’t support it yet, so it isn’t a safe default across mainstream browsers as a group.

This gap hurts most on icon and brand-mark work, where the smoothed curve is often the whole point and a flattened export quietly undoes the design.

Handing off a file for the first time? This Dev Mode guide walks through the inspection panel above. For a repeatable process between design and engineering, this breakdown of Figma developer handoff covers how radius and other tokens usually get documented.

FAQ on How To Round Corners In Figma

Is corner smoothing the same thing as corner radius?

No. Corner radius rounds a corner into a plain circular arc, while corner smoothing reshapes that arc into a continuous squircle curve. They share a panel and control different parts of the same geometry.

What is the maximum corner radius value a shape can take?

Figma sets no fixed pixel ceiling. The practical maximum is half the shape’s shortest side, since anything larger just produces a full pill. Independent corners cap out the same way on their own edges.

Can corner radius be set through the Figma API or a plugin?

Yes. The plugin API exposes radius as cornerRadius and smoothing as cornerSmoothing, both settable on rectangles, frames, and other supported nodes. Plugins read and write these directly, no properties panel involved.

What Should You Fix First When Corner Radius in Figma Breaks Down?

When a radius refuses to behave, the cause is almost always independent corners left on for a single corner, auto layout clipping on the parent frame, or a shape that was drawn or edited with the pen tool.

Check independent corners first, because confirming it takes one click. Auto layout comes second, since clipping hides a perfectly correct radius behind a wrong-looking result. Vector edit mode goes last, because it affects the fewest shapes.

Worth noting how fast variables took hold, by the way. They launched in June 2023, and Supernova’s State of Design Tokens 2024 report already found 69.8 percent adoption within about a year. That’s an unusual curve for a single interface property.

From here, the same radius logic carries straight over to shaping a button in Figma.