How to Add Dynamic Dropdown to Jotform Easily 2026

From My Workspace, every form you have built appears as a row with its submission count and the date it was last edited. If you are starting fresh, click Create in the top left instead. Either way, open the specific form so you land in the actual Form Builder, since the Dynamic Dropdowns widget only installs from inside a form's build view, not from the workspace list.

Once you are inside a form, you land on the BUILD tab with your fields stacked top to bottom and an Add Element button pinned to the top left. This canvas is where the rest of the setup happens.

Every field you already have, such as Full Name or Email Address, sits here, and the dynamic dropdown will slot in wherever you drop it. Decide where in the form the dependent menus should sit before you go looking for the widget.

Click Add Element to open the Form Elements sidebar, then switch from Basic to the Widgets tab. Dynamic Dropdowns is not a Basic field like Full Name or Email, so it will not show up until you make that switch.

Type "dynamic" into the search box to filter the list down to Dynamic QR Code, Dynamic Textbox, and Dynamic Dropdowns. Once you have the right one, drag it onto the canvas at the point where you want the cascading menus to appear. Jotform drops in a placeholder pair of dropdowns, a parent and a child, which you configure next.

Click the widget to open its settings panel on the right, then type your full option list in the Values field. Indentation with spaces defines the parent-child relationship: a top-level item like "USA" sits flush left, and everything indented one level underneath it becomes the options that appear only when USA is selected.

Jotform's own documentation adds three details the widget doesn't explain on screen: include a dot (.) as one of the choices in a set to show a blank "Please select" option by default; append an asterisk (*) to a parent option to make its own children required; and keep the whole Values field under 65,000 characters, since a longer list both risks truncation and slows the widget down. Building and indenting the list in a plain text editor first, then pasting it in, makes the structure far easier to keep straight than typing directly into the narrow settings box. Below the list, set the label, the placeholder text, and the separator (comma, semicolon, or forward slash) used between tiers if you have more than two levels.

Click Update to save the widget settings, then open Preview Form and interact with the dropdowns as a respondent would. Pick a parent value and confirm the child list updates to only the relevant options.

Test on both desktop and a mobile viewport, since cascading widgets sometimes render tap targets differently on smaller screens. If a child list is not updating, the cause is almost always a stray space in the indentation back in the Values field.