Increase tick label font size in seaborn

Expanding on the accepted answer, if you want to just rescale the font size of the tick labels without scaling other labels by the same amount, you can try this:

import pandas as pd, numpy as np, seaborn as sns
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

# Generate data
df = pd.DataFrame({"Draughts": np.random.randn(100)})

# Plot using seaborn
b = sns.violinplot(y = "Draughts", data = df)
b.set_yticklabels(b.get_yticks(), size = 15)

plt.show()

• This answer will address setting x or y ticklabel size independently.
• sns.set(font_scale=2) from p-robot will set all the figure fonts.
• The answer from Kabir Ahuja works because y-labels position is being used as the text.
  • If there are y-labels text, that solution will not work.
• There are a number of ways to get ticks and labels:
  • plt.xticks()
  • ax.get_xticklabels()
  • ax.get_xticks()
• Tested in python 3.10, matplotlib 3.5.2, seaborn 0.12.0

Given the following plot

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

# data
tips = sns.load_dataset("tips")

# plot figure
plt.figure(figsize=(8, 6))
p = sns.violinplot(x="day", y="total_bill", data=tips)

# get label text
_, ylabels = plt.yticks()
_, xlabels = plt.xticks()
plt.show()

Setting the y-axis doesn’t work

# plot figure
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8, 6))
sns.violinplot(x="day", y="total_bill", data=tips, ax=ax)

print(ax.get_xticks())
print(ax.get_yticks())
print('n')
print(ax.get_xticklabels())
print(ax.get_yticklabels())
print('n')
print(plt.xticks())
print(plt.yticks())
print('n')

# get label text
yticks, ylabels = plt.yticks()
xticks, xlabels = plt.xticks()

print(ylabels)

print(yticks)

# there is no text label
print(ylabels[0].get_text())

# there are text labels on the x-axis
print(xlabels)

# the answer from Kabir Ahuja works because of this
print(ax.get_yticks())

# set the x-axis ticklabel size
ax.set_xticklabels(xlabels, size=5)

# in this case, the following won't work because the text is ''
# this is what to do if the there are text labels
ax.set_yticklabels(ylabels, size=15)

plt.show()

print output

[0 1 2 3]
[-10.   0.  10.  20.  30.  40.  50.  60.  70.]

[Text(0, 0, 'Thur'), Text(1, 0, 'Fri'), Text(2, 0, 'Sat'), Text(3, 0, 'Sun')]
[Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, '')]

(array([0, 1, 2, 3]), [Text(0, 0, 'Thur'), Text(1, 0, 'Fri'), Text(2, 0, 'Sat'), Text(3, 0, 'Sun')])
(array([-10.,   0.,  10.,  20.,  30.,  40.,  50.,  60.,  70.]), [Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, '')])

[Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, ''), Text(0, 0, '')]
[-10.   0.  10.  20.  30.  40.  50.  60.  70.]
← empty string from ylabels[0].get_text()
[Text(0, 0, 'Thur'), Text(1, 0, 'Fri'), Text(2, 0, 'Sat'), Text(3, 0, 'Sun')]
[-10.   0.  10.  20.  30.  40.  50.  60.  70.]

plot

• There are no ytick labels because
  • y_text = [y.get_text() for y in ylabels] = ['', '', '', '', '', '', '', '', '']

To set yticklabel size

# use
p.set_yticklabels(p.get_yticks(), size=15)

# or
_, ylabels = plt.yticks()
p.set_yticklabels(ylabels, size=15)

To set xticklabel size

# use
p.set_xticklabels(p.get_xticks(), size=15)

# or
_, xlabels = plt.xticks()
p.set_xticklabels(xlabels, size=15)

This works

# plot figure
fig , ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8, 6))
sns.violinplot(x="day", y="total_bill", data=tips, ax=ax)

# get label text
_, xlabels = plt.xticks()

# set the x-labels with
ax.set_xticklabels(xlabels, size=5)

# prevents: UserWarning: FixedFormatter should only be used together with FixedLocator
ax.set_yticks(ax.get_yticks()[1:])
# set the y-labels with
_ = ax.set_yticklabels(ax.get_yticks(), size=5)