Here I present a solution which came up mostly from Christian Feuersänger (the author of PGFPlots), but he allowed me to post it here.
(For the record: I added a Feature Request to the PGFPlots Tracker to implement a simpler interface for that.)
For more details on how the solution works, please have a look at the comments in the code.
% used PGFPlots v1.14\documentclass[border=5pt]{standalone}\usepackage{pgfplots} \pgfplotsset{ % use this `compat' level or higher to use the "advanced" placing of % the axis labels compat=1.3, % create a new style to move the `tick scale label' to the axis labels tick scale labels in axis labels/.code={ \pgfkeysgetvalue{/pgfplots/xtick scale label code/.@cmd}\temp % remember the original value of 'xtick scale label code': \pgfkeyslet{/pgfplots/xtick scale label code orig/.@cmd}\temp % \pgfkeysalso{ % simply remember the value in some global macro: xtick scale label code/.code={ \gdef\xTickScale{##1} }, % now, _modify_ any user-specified value of 'xlabel' by % appending the tick scale label. % In order to evaluate this modification AFTER the user % wrote "xlabel={$x$}", we add it to 'every axis': every axis/.append style={ % because we don't need the "binop" in this context just % set it to nothing tick scale binop={}, xlabel/.add = {}{ (\pgfplotsset{xtick scale label code orig=\xTickScale}\,m) }, }, } }, }\begin{document} \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis}[ % activate/load the created style tick scale labels in axis labels, xlabel=$x$, ylabel=$y$, ] \addplot coordinates { (0.0,0.0)(100,1)(400,2)(10000,0) }; \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture}\end{document}