diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.20.2.txt b/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.20.2.txt
index 1f71710d19e44..7f04a6a12b480 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.20.2.txt
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.20.2.txt
@@ -59,6 +59,7 @@ I/O
 - Bug in pd.read_csv() when comment is passed in space deliminted text files (:issue:`16472`)
 - Bug that would force importing of the clipboard routines unnecessarily, potentially causing an import error on startup (:issue:`16288`)
 - Bug that raised IndexError HTML-rendering an empty DataFrame (:issue:`15953`)
+- Bug where ``DataFrame.to_html()`` ignored the ``index_names`` parameter (:issue:`16493`)
 
 
 Plotting
diff --git a/pandas/io/formats/format.py b/pandas/io/formats/format.py
index 054db769c56dd..3deaec2dfbbc5 100644
--- a/pandas/io/formats/format.py
+++ b/pandas/io/formats/format.py
@@ -1292,7 +1292,9 @@ def _column_header():
             self.write_tr(col_row, indent, self.indent_delta, header=True,
                           align=align)
 
-        if self.fmt.has_index_names and self.fmt.index:
+        if all((self.fmt.has_index_names,
+                self.fmt.index,
+                self.fmt.show_index_names)):
             row = ([x if x is not None else ''
                     for x in self.frame.index.names] +
                    [''] * min(len(self.columns), self.max_cols))
diff --git a/pandas/tests/io/formats/test_to_html.py b/pandas/tests/io/formats/test_to_html.py
index cde920b1511d2..9f4e532ec2287 100644
--- a/pandas/tests/io/formats/test_to_html.py
+++ b/pandas/tests/io/formats/test_to_html.py
@@ -1869,3 +1869,10 @@ def test_to_html_notebook_has_no_style(self):
         df = pd.DataFrame({"A": [1, 2, 3]})
         result = df.to_html()
         assert "thead tr:only-child" not in result
+
+    def test_to_html_with_index_names_false(self):
+        # gh-16493
+        df = pd.DataFrame({"A": [1, 2]}, index=pd.Index(['a', 'b'],
+                                                        name='myindexname'))
+        result = df.to_html(index_names=False)
+        assert 'myindexname' not in result