How to put the legend out of the plot

Question

I have a series of 20 plots (not subplots) to be made in a single figure. I want the legend to be outside of the box. At the same time, I do not want to change the axes, a

Answer 1

It's worth refreshing this question, as newer versions of Matplotlib have made it much easier to position the legend outside the plot. I produced this example with Matplotlib version 3.1.1.

Users can pass a 2-tuple of coordinates to the loc parameter to position the legend anywhere in the bounding box. The only gotcha is you need to run plt.tight_layout() to get matplotlib to recompute the plot dimensions so the legend is visible:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.plot([0, 1], [0, 1], label="Label 1")
plt.plot([0, 1], [0, 2], label='Label 2')

plt.legend(loc=(1.05, 0.5))
plt.tight_layout()

This leads to the following plot:

References:

• https://matplotlib.org/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.pyplot.legend.html
• https://showmecode.info/matplotlib/legend/reposition-legend/ (personal site)