Summary The known results of optimal allocation in two‐stage simple random sampling with stratification from finite population are generalized for J‐stages. The optimalization is treated by minimizing the cost function for given variance as well as by minimizing the variance for given cost. It turns out that for both cases the optimal values differ only for the first‐stage units and are the same for all the subsequent. The general formula for minimum variance of the unbiased estimator of the population mean per element i