Material Symbols

About Material Symbols

Material Symbols is an open-source SVG icon set with 15,341 icons created by Google. Every icon is free to use under the Apache 2.0 license — fine for personal projects, side projects, and most commercial work. Always check the upstream license for edge cases.

How to use Material Symbols icons

The fastest way is to embed an icon as an <img> from the Iconify CDN — no install, no build step, no JavaScript required.

Inline HTML

<img src="https://api.iconify.design/material-symbols/downloading.svg" width="24" height="24" alt="downloading icon" />

CSS background

.icon-downloading {
  background: url('https://api.iconify.design/material-symbols/downloading.svg') center / contain no-repeat;
  width: 24px;
  height: 24px;
}

React (with @iconify/react)

import { Icon } from '@iconify/react';

<Icon icon="material-symbols:downloading" width="24" />

Recolouring Material Symbols icons

Material Symbols icons use currentColor, so changing colour is a one-line CSS rule. Set color on the parent element and the icon adopts it. This makes the set easy to theme for light mode, dark mode, and brand colour accents.

Search engine–safe usage

Always include a meaningful alt attribute on <img> tags or an aria-label on inline SVGs. For purely decorative icons (where text already conveys the meaning), use alt="" so screen readers skip them.

License & attribution

Material Symbols is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. Read the full terms at the official license page. Most permissive licenses (MIT, Apache 2.0, CC0) don’t require attribution in shipped binaries, but it’s considered good practice to credit the icon set in your project’s docs or about page.

Want a different look? Browse all 225+ icon collections or jump to our brand-logo–specific page at /brands.