jats:titleAbstract</jats:title>jats:pFollowing Smiley’s (jats:italicThe Journal of Symbolic Logic, 28</jats:italic>, 113–134 1963) influential proposal, it has become standard practice to characterise notions of relative necessity in terms of simple strict conditionals. However, Humberstone (jats:italicReports on Mathematical Logic, 13</jats:italic>, 33–42 1981) and others have highlighted various flaws with Smiley’s now standard account of relative necessity. In their recent article, Hale and Leech (jats:italicJournal of Philosophical Logic, 46</jats:italic>, 1–26 2017) propose a novel account of relative necessity designed to overcome the problems facing the standard account. Nevertheless, the current article argues that Hale & Leech’s account suffers from its own defects, some of which Hale & Leech are aware of but underplay. To supplement this criticism, the article offers an alternative account of relative necessity which overcomes these defects. This alternative account is developed in a quantified modal propositional logic and is shown model-theoretically to meet several desiderata of an account of relative necessity.</jats:p>