.txt MIME type

Q: What Content-Type header should a .txt file be served with?

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8. As a text format, include the charset so browsers don't guess the encoding. It compresses well, so let the server apply gzip or Brotli.

Plain texttext & code

text/plain

Unformatted text. Also what many servers fall back to for files they don't recognise as binary.

MIME type	text/plain
Extensions	.txt
Content-Type	text/plain; charset=utf-8
Compress in transit?	Yes — enable gzip or Brotli

Good to know

Without charset=utf-8, browsers may guess the encoding and show accented characters as mojibake (Ã© instead of é).
A script or stylesheet accidentally served as text/plain is blocked when nosniff is set.

Serve .txt files with the right type

The response header to send:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8

Most servers pick the type from the file extension. If yours sends the wrong one, map it explicitly:

nginx (inside the types block in mime.types)

text/plain txt;

Apache (.htaccess or server config)

AddType text/plain .txt

Express

res.set("Content-Type", "text/plain; charset=utf-8");

Python

import mimetypes

mimetypes.add_type("text/plain", ".txt")

HTML file input

<input type="file" accept=".txt,text/plain">

Check it

See what a server sends for a file, and what type a local file really is by its contents:

curl -sI https://example.com/file.txt | grep -i '^content-type:'
file --mime-type file.txt

Frequently asked questions

What is the MIME type for .txt files?

text/plain.

What Content-Type header should a .txt file be served with?

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8. As a text format, include the charset so browsers don't guess the encoding. It compresses well, so let the server apply gzip or Brotli.

Related types

.md .csv .html all MIME types →

Headers that go with it: Content-Type · Content-Disposition · X-Content-Type-Options