---
title: norms
description: Norms store various normalization factors that are later used at query time in order to compute the score of a document relatively to a query. Although...
url: https://www.elastic.co/elastic/docs-builder/docs/3028/reference/elasticsearch/mapping-reference/norms
products:
  - Elasticsearch
applies_to:
  - Elastic Cloud Serverless: Generally available
  - Elastic Stack: Generally available
---

# norms
Norms store various normalization factors that are later used at query time in order to compute the score of a document relatively to a query.
Although useful for scoring, norms also require quite a lot of disk (typically in the order of one byte per document per field in your index, even for documents that don’t have this specific field). As a consequence, if you don’t need scoring on a specific field, you should disable norms on that field. In particular, this is the case for fields that are used solely for filtering or aggregations.
<tip>
  Norms can be disabled on existing fields using the [update mapping API](https://www.elastic.co/docs/api/doc/elasticsearch/operation/operation-indices-put-mapping).
</tip>

Norms can be disabled (but not reenabled after the fact), using the [update mapping API](https://www.elastic.co/docs/api/doc/elasticsearch/operation/operation-indices-put-mapping) like so:
```json

{
  "properties": {
    "title": {
      "type": "text",
      "norms": false
    }
  }
}
```

<note>
  Norms will not be removed instantly, but will be removed as old segments are merged into new segments as you continue indexing new documents. Any score computation on a field that has had norms removed might return inconsistent results since some documents won’t have norms anymore while other documents might still have norms.
</note>