Button grew up in Vobster, Somerset, the son of former rallycross driver John Button. He received a go-kart as a Christmas present in 1987 and began racing at Clay Pigeon Raceway in May 1988, aged eight. His natural talent surfaced almost immediately: he won all 34 races of the 1991 British Cadet Kart Championship with team Wright Karts.
Further titles followed throughout the mid-1990s. Button won multiple British Open Kart Championship rounds and became the youngest driver and first Briton to claim the European Super A Championship, also taking the Ayrton Senna Memorial Cup at the 1997 Japanese World Cup. He was runner-up in the Formula A World Championship at age 15.
Button moved into single-seater car racing in 1998, taking the British Formula Ford Championship in a Haywood Racing Mygale SJ98 car with nine victories and winning the Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch. In 1999 he drove in the British Formula 3 International Series, winning three races and finishing third overall as top rookie. At the end of 1998 he won the Autosport BRDC Award, which included a test in a McLaren MP4/14.
Button made his Formula One debut with Williams in 2000 after a shoot-out test against Bruno Junqueira, becoming Britain's youngest F1 driver at the time, beating the record previously held by Stirling Moss. A sixth-place finish at the Brazilian Grand Prix made him the youngest driver in history to score a championship point. Williams intended him only as a short-term solution until Juan Pablo Montoya became available, and Button was loaned to Benetton for 2001.
At Benetton, partnering Giancarlo Fisichella, Button struggled with an uncompetitive car lacking power steering. He scored just two points in 2001. The team rebranded as Renault in 2002, and his performance improved markedly alongside Jarno Trulli. Despite showing faster race pace than his more experienced teammate, he was released to make room for Fernando Alonso.
Button joined British American Racing (BAR) for 2003, partnering Jacques Villeneuve. An initially difficult working relationship with Villeneuve settled as Button's performance improved. The 2004 season was his breakthrough year: he took ten podiums in eighteen races, including his first career podium at the Malaysian Grand Prix, and finished third in the Drivers' Championship while helping BAR to second in the Constructors' Championship. Contract disputes with Williams threatened his position mid-season, but an F1 Contract Recognition Board ruling forced him to stay at BAR. In 2005, regulatory changes hampered the car's competitiveness and Button fell to ninth in the championship.
BAR became the Honda works team for 2006, and Button partnered Rubens Barrichello. After 113 races without a win, he finally claimed his first Grand Prix victory at a rain-affected Hungarian Grand Prix, starting from fourteenth on the grid. The 2007 and 2008 seasons proved much harder; the Honda RA108 was deeply uncompetitive and Button scored only three points in 2008. On 4 December 2008, Honda announced its withdrawal from Formula One.
Ross Brawn led a management buyout of Honda, renaming the team Brawn GP. Button signed on with a pay cut. The Brawn BGP 001, featuring a double diffuser and a Mercedes-Benz V8 engine, proved strikingly quick in pre-season testing. Button won six of the first seven races of the season, equalling the record for most wins from a season's opening races, and led the championship from start to finish. He secured the title at the Brazilian Grand Prix. Brawn GP also won the Constructors' Championship, one of the most celebrated underdog stories in Formula One history.
Button moved to McLaren for 2010, partnering Lewis Hamilton in a highly anticipated all-British line-up. He won in Australia and China that year and finished fifth in the championship. In 2011 he improved to runner-up with three victories, including a famous win at the rain-affected Canadian Grand Prix after working from the back of the field. The 2012 season produced two further wins, in Belgium and Brazil. From 2013 onward, McLaren's competitiveness faded, and after Honda's return as engine supplier from 2015 power and reliability problems became endemic. Button retired from full-time Formula One at the end of 2016, making a one-off return at the 2017 Monaco Grand Prix to deputise for Fernando Alonso.
Button demonstrated sustained competitive ability after Formula One. He won the 2018 Super GT Series GT500 title alongside Naoki Yamamoto for Team Kunimitsu in a Honda NSX-GT, becoming the first rookie champion in that series since 2005. He also competed in FIA World Endurance Championship events, achieving a best result of second at the 6 Hours of São Paulo in 2025, and ran three NASCAR Cup Series races in 2023 for Rick Ware Racing. He ended his professional racing career after the 2025 8 Hours of Bahrain.
Button was known for an exceptionally smooth driving style, with precise, flowing steering and throttle inputs that minimised tyre degradation and excelled in variable or wet conditions. Journalist Mark Hughes described his ability to sense how much momentum could be carried through a corner as making his inputs "graceful and beautifully co-ordinated." This style could be a disadvantage in qualifying on cool tracks, where generating tyre temperature over a single lap proved difficult, but it gave him superior consistency and racecraft over long distances.
Button is regarded as one of the most complete Formula One drivers of his generation, though debates over his ultimate ranking relative to contemporaries such as Michael Schumacher and Ayrton Senna persisted throughout his career. His 2009 championship with Brawn GP — a team that did not formally exist three months before the season began — stands as one of the most improbable title campaigns in Formula One history. He was appointed MBE in the 2010 New Year Honours, inducted into the FIA Hall of Fame in 2017, and won the Hawthorn Memorial Trophy five times as the most successful British or Commonwealth driver in a season. His hometown of Frome named a street and a footbridge after him and awarded him the freedom of the town.