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Abstract Many wide-gap organic semiconductors exhibit imbalanced electron and hole transport, therefore efficient organic light-emitting diodes require a multilayer architecture of electron- and hole-transport materials to confine charge recombination to the emissive layer. Here, we show that even for emitters with imbalanced charge transport, it is possible to obtain highly efficient single-layer organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs), without the need for additional charge-transport and blocking layers. For hole-dominated emitters, an inverted single-layer device architecture with ohmic bottom-electron and top-hole contacts moves the emission zone away from the metal top electrode, thereby more than doubling the optical outcoupling efficiency. Finally, a blue-emitting inverted single-layer OLED based on thermally activated delayed fluorescence is achieved, exhibiting a high external quantum efficiency of 19% with little roll-off at high brightness, demonstrating that balanced charge transport is not a prerequisite for highly efficient single-layer OLEDs.