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Artificial lighting allows humans to be active at night, but has many unintended consequences, including interference with ecological processes, disruption of circadian rhythms and increased exposure to insect vectors of diseases. Although ultraviolet and blue light are usually most attractive to arthropods, degree of attraction varies among orders. With a focus on future indoor lighting applications, we manipulated the spectrum of white lamps to investigate the influence of spectral composition on number of arthropods attracted. We compared numbers of arthropods captured at three customizable light-emitting diode (LED) lamps (3510, 2704 and 2728 K), two commercial LED lamps (2700 K), two commercial compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs; 2700 K) and a control. We configured the three custom LEDs to minimize invertebrate attraction based on published attraction curves for honeybees and moths. Lamps were placed with pan traps at an urban and two rural study sites in Los Angeles, California. For all invertebrate orders combined, our custom LED configurations were less attractive than the commercial LED lamps or CFLs of similar colour temperatures. Thus, adjusting spectral composition of white light to minimize attracting nocturnal arthropods is feasible; not all lights with the same colour temperature are equally attractive to arthropods., (© 2015 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.)