Why is my xlabel cut off in my matplotlib plot?

Use:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.gcf().subplots_adjust(bottom=0.15)

to make room for the label.

Edit:

Since i gave the answer, matplotlib has added the tight_layout() function. So i suggest to use it:

plt.tight_layout()

should make room for the xlabel.

An easy option is to configure matplotlib to automatically adjust the plot size. It works perfectly for me and I'm not sure why it's not activated by default.

Method 1

Set this in your matplotlibrc file

figure.autolayout : True

See here for more information on customizing the matplotlibrc file: http://matplotlib.org/users/customizing.html

Method 2

Update the rcParams during runtime like this

from matplotlib import rcParams
rcParams.update({'figure.autolayout': True})

The advantage of using this approach is that your code will produce the same graphs on differently-configured machines.

In case you want to store it to a file, you solve it using bbox_inches="tight" argument:

plt.savefig('myfile.png', bbox_inches = "tight")