Definition
Field-Level Help is custom help text that administrators can add to any standard or custom field, displayed as a small help icon next to the field label on record detail and edit pages. When users hover over or click the icon, the help text appears, providing guidance on the field's purpose, expected format, or business rules. It supports up to 255 characters of plain text.
Real-World Example
At their company, a Salesforce administrator at Coastal Health leverages Field-Level Help to maintain data quality and enforce organizational policies across the platform. By properly setting up Field-Level Help, they prevent common data entry errors and ensure that users follow established business processes, which saves the support team hours of cleanup work each week.
Why Field-Level Help Matters
Field-Level Help is admin-defined help text that can be added to any standard or custom field, displayed as a small help icon next to the field label on record detail and edit pages. When users hover over or click the icon, the help text appears, providing guidance on the field's purpose, expected format, or business rules. It supports up to 255 characters of plain text and is configured per field in Setup.
Field-Level Help is one of the lowest-effort, highest-impact improvements an admin can make to a Salesforce org. Users naturally have questions about fields ('what does this mean?', 'what should I put here?', 'is this required?'), and Field-Level Help answers them in context without requiring a support ticket. Mature orgs treat Field-Level Help as part of the standard custom field creation process: every new field gets help text before it goes to production. The result is fewer support tickets, better data quality, and faster user onboarding.
How Organizations Use Field-Level Help
- •Coastal Health — Adds Field-Level Help to every clinical field explaining data entry requirements and clinical context. The help text dramatically reduced 'what goes in this field?' tickets.
- •NovaScale — Treats Field-Level Help as a required step in their custom field creation process. No new field goes to production without it.
- •BrightEdge Solutions — Uses Field-Level Help to communicate business rules that can't be enforced through validation, like 'use sentence case for Account names'.