No. Under the Twenty-Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, no one can be elected president of the United States more than twice, so a third elected term is not allowed. The only narrow way anyone could legally serve past two terms involves a vice president who inherits the office partway through someone else’s term, and even that path caps total service at roughly ten years. Nothing short of repealing the amendment can change the rule.
What the Twenty-Second Amendment Actually Says
The operative sentence is short: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”1Congress.gov. U.S. Constitution – Twenty-Second Amendment The word “elected” carries the rule. It doesn’t matter whether the two terms are consecutive or split by years out of office. A president who served two terms with a gap between them, the way Grover Cleveland served as the 22nd and 24th president, would still be barred from a third election.
The ballot format doesn’t matter either. Write-in candidacies are not a workaround. The amendment applies to any “person” who has already been elected twice, not just to names printed on ballots.1Congress.gov. U.S. Constitution – Twenty-Second Amendment
The One Exception: Succession and the Ten-Year Cap
The amendment addresses a specific scenario: someone who becomes president without being elected to the job, usually a vice president who takes over after a death, resignation, or removal. The rule draws a line at two years.
If a person serves more than two years of a predecessor’s unexpired term, they can only win one election of their own afterward. If they serve two years or less of that inherited term, they remain eligible to win two full elections.1Congress.gov. U.S. Constitution – Twenty-Second Amendment The result is a hard ceiling of about ten years. A vice president who steps up with just under two years left on the clock could serve out that remainder and then win two full four-year terms.
No one has actually served that long. Lyndon Johnson finished roughly fourteen months of John F. Kennedy’s term and then won his own election in 1964; he was eligible for another run in 1968 but chose not to seek it. Gerald Ford served about two and a half years of Richard Nixon’s term after Nixon’s resignation, which would have limited him to a single election of his own, and he lost that 1976 race.
Could a Two-Term President Return as Vice President?
A question that surfaces repeatedly: could a two-term former president become vice president, then succeed to the presidency if the sitting president left office? No court has ever ruled on it, so the honest answer is that the law is unsettled.
Two amendments pull in different directions. The Twelfth Amendment states that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President.”2Legal Information Institute. 12th Amendment The Twenty-Second Amendment bars a person from being “elected” president more than twice.1Congress.gov. U.S. Constitution – Twenty-Second Amendment Whether “ineligible to the office” means the same thing as “ineligible to be elected to the office” is the disputed point.
One reading holds that a two-term president is ineligible to hold the presidency in any capacity, which would also disqualify them from the vice presidency under the Twelfth Amendment. The competing reading treats the Twenty-Second Amendment as blocking only election, not succession, meaning a former two-term president could serve as vice president and then take over through the line of succession without being “elected” again. Academic argument on this scenario dates back at least to a 1999 law review article, and any real attempt would almost certainly end up before the Supreme Court.3National Constitution Center. The 22nd Amendment and Presidential Service Beyond Two Terms
What It Would Take to Change the Rule
Because the two-term limit is part of the Constitution, no statute, executive order, or court ruling can lift it. Changing the rule requires amending the Constitution again, and that process is intentionally hard.
Congress must propose the change by a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate. Two-thirds of state legislatures can also call a constitutional convention to propose an amendment, though that route has never succeeded. Whichever method proposes the change, three-fourths of state legislatures or state ratifying conventions must then approve it.4Congress.gov. Overview of Article V, Amending the Constitution With fifty states, that means thirty-eight have to say yes.
Repeal proposals get introduced periodically and none has advanced. The most recent is H.J.Res.29, introduced in January 2025, which would allow a president to be elected up to three times while prohibiting more than two consecutive terms.5Congress.gov. H.J.Res.29 – 119th Congress (2025-2026) Clearing two-thirds of both chambers and then winning ratification in thirty-eight states has happened only twenty-seven times in U.S. history. Barring an extraordinary shift, the two-term limit stays.
The origin of the rule also explains why it is unlikely to move. It was written into the Constitution specifically because Franklin D. Roosevelt won four elections between 1932 and 1944 and died in office on April 12, 1945, breaking the two-term precedent every previous president had followed.6FDR Presidential Library & Museum. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Presidency Congress proposed the amendment on March 21, 1947, and the states ratified it on February 27, 1951.7Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum. Constitutional Amendments – Amendment 22 – Term Limits for the Presidency Undoing it would take the same supermajority consensus that put it there.