Can confirm. I have to do this all the time. Some coworkers just delete it, and I have to explain the situation every time when they see in the git blame that I put that semicolon there. As someone pointed out in another comment, in switch statements you should just start a new scope with {}. But in actual labels it’s just better to put a load-bearing semicolon. You don’t need to put it in another line though, I just put them like this: int main() { int *a = malloc(sizeof(*a)); if (init_a(a) <= 0) { goto err; } do_something(a); err:; int ret = 0; if (a == NULL) { ret = -1; } free(a); return ret; }