 <p>You can use the logical negation of <code>is.null</code> here. That can be applied over the list with <code>vapply</code>, and we can return the non-null elements with <code>[</code></p> <pre><code>(mylist &lt;- list(1:5, NULL, letters[1:5])) # [[1]] # [1] 1 2 3 4 5 # [[2]] # NULL # [[3]] # [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" mylist[vapply(mylist, Negate(is.null), NA)] # [[1]] # [1] 1 2 3 4 5 # [[2]] # [1] "a" "b" "c" "d" "e" </code></pre>