Do you actually need the self-referencing hreflang tag?

Do you actually need the self-referencing hreflang tag?

Short answer: yes. The longer answer explains why so many sites skip it and lose without noticing.

Hreflang works as a set of mutual confirmations. Page A says "my French twin is B", page B must say "my English twin is A", and both must also list themselves. Google calls this the return tag requirement. A cluster where the self-reference is missing is not invalid, but it becomes fragile: any inconsistency across the other pages breaks the whole group, and there is no anchor to fall back on.

What happens in practice without self-reference:

— Search Console reports "no return tags" for pairs that look correct to a human eye
— A page with a slightly different trailing slash than its own self-reference gets kicked out of the cluster
— Template changes on one language version desync the others, and nobody notices for months

Adding the self-reference costs one line per page. Removing the ambiguity it prevents costs weeks of debugging. Add it, keep it identical to the canonical, and move on.