Nonrelativistic quantum electrodynamics (NRQED) is an effective field theory that describes a nonrelativistic spin 1/2 -particle interacting with the electromagnetic field. We present a detailed discussion of the NRQED Lagrangian up to order 1/𝑀3, in which we introduce a procedure to construct all valid terms at the respective order and show the explicit calculations for each term. We motivate the construction of the NRQED Lagrangian by discussing properties of the Lagrangian of quantum electrodynamics (QED).