Twenty-Second Amendment
Presidential Succession & Terms · Turning an unwritten norm into a hard constitutional rule
Ratified in 1951, the Twenty-Second Amendment limits a president to two elected terms. For nearly 150 years before that, the two-term limit existed only as an informal tradition, not a legal requirement.
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.
Twenty-Second Amendment, ratified 1951
The text
Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
Section 2. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States within seven years from the date of its submission to the States by the Congress.
Spelling and punctuation as transcribed by the National Archives.
An Unwritten Tradition, Then a Written Rule
George Washington voluntarily stepped down after two terms, and every president who followed honored that precedent as an unwritten norm for nearly a century and a half — until Franklin D. Roosevelt broke it, winning four consecutive elections between 1932 and 1944. Congress proposed this amendment shortly after, converting the informal tradition into a binding constitutional limit.
The limit covers being elected, with a real partial-term nuance
A common misconception is that the amendment simply caps anyone at eight years total in office. The actual rule is more specific: someone who serves more than two years of another president’s term (through succession) can only be elected in their own right once more, not twice — meaning it’s technically possible, in a specific scenario, to serve up to nearly ten years as president without ever violating the amendment’s text.