In this article, I am going to show you how to display contour labels at specific intervals in ArcGIS Pro. Let’s say that we have a 10m contour layer and we want to display the contour label every 50 meters only, not all the 10 meters. There is an easy trick for this but I don’t think that this trick is explained in the ArcGIS Pro documentation.
As you can see below, by default, the ArcGIS Pro label will display all the labels in a field that we choose for labeling.
For some reason, we don’t want to show all the labels. If the area is wide and big, your computer will be struggling to show all the labels. Also, it may not necessary to show all the labels on the map. So what should we do to display certain contour intervals only?
How to Display Contour Labels at Specific Intervals
Right-click the contour layer and choose Labeling Properties to open the advanced labeling options. And then click the SQL button and create a new expression.
Enable the SQL by sliding the button to the right. After that, you should see an SQL box where we will write our SQL codes. Type the following code:
MOD(alti,50)=0Change alti to your actual elevation column/field in the contour layer. This will only display a contour label on every 50 meters contour. So, it will only show 50, 100, 150, etc.
The result will look like this
