How to make your Mac turn on and off on a schedule

Learn how to turn your Mac on and off on a schedule for enhanced productivity, and energy efficiency.

Power on Apple logo screen on MacBook

Your Mac can be made to power on and shut down on a custom schedule. Having your computer start up 5 minutes or so before you get to your desk is a great way to have your emails, photos, messages, calendars and other personal information items updated and refreshed before you even touch the keyboard. This helps reduce the time necessary to wait to use the machine.

Likewise, you may want to set your Mac to shut down at a specified time rather than sleep in order to save power. For instance, my custom power schedule is set to automatically shut down my MacBook Air about half an hour after I finish working on workdays.

How to use power scheduling on Mac

You will have to use the Terminal or the scheduling feature in your Battery settings to set a time for your Mac to automatically start up, wake, sleep, restart, or shut down.

macOS Ventura and macOS Sonoma

Open Terminal on your Mac, enter the following pmset command, and hit the enter key. Next, enter your Mac’s password if asked.

Schedule your Mac to wake up at a particular time and day:

sudo pmset repeat wake M 9:00:00

The above command will have your Mac wake up at 9 AM every Monday.

You can change the time and the date accordingly in the above command. Replace 9:00:00 with another time as per the hh:mm:ss format.

To change the day, you will have to replace M (Monday) with the following alphabet:

  • Monday: M
  • Tuesday: T
  • Wednesday: W
  • Thursday: R
  • Friday: F
  • Saturday: S
  • Sunday: U

You can also replace the word wake with sleep, poweron, shutdown, or wakeorpoweron to do the said things.

You can learn more about pmset commands in this Apple PDF.

See the current power ON or shutdown schedule:

pmset -g sched

Cancel the current schedule:

sudo pmset repeat cancel

macOS Monterey or earlier

Apple removed the scheduling options from System Settings on macOS Ventura and later. However, the power scheduling feature is built into System Preferences on macOS Monterey and earlier.

1) Open System Preferences.

2) Click the Battery icon.

3) Click Schedule on the left.

4) Now create your custom power schedule:

  • Start up or wake: Tick the top checkbox and choose a day or group of days from the pop-up menu, then enter a time.
  • Sleep, restart or shut down: Tick the bottom checkbox and select Sleep, Restart or Shut Down from the pop-up menu, then choose a day or group of days from the pop-up menu on the right and enter a time.

5) Click the Apply button.

Battery, Schedule on Mac

Important caveats

In order to shut down automatically, you must, of course be logged in to your Mac.

Furthermore, the computer needs to be awake at the time that it’s scheduled to shut down and remain awake for at least ten minutes past that time.

If your computer happens to be sleeping at its scheduled shutdown time, it will continue sleeping instead of shutting down. Similarly, if you’re logged out (i.e. you’re at macOS’s Login screen), your Mac also won’t shut down.

If your Mac is set to go to sleep after less than 15 minutes of inactivity, it might go back to sleep before macOS has finished shutting it down. To ensure the system shuts down even when it’s sleeping, set it to start up or wake 5 minutes before your scheduled shutdown time.

Also, having any documents open with unsaved changes may prevent a Mac from going to sleep or shutting down when scheduled. And lastly, if you’re going to make your Mac start up on a schedule, be sure that it’s connected to a power adapter.

Related: Set apps to launch automatically when your Mac starts up

Shutting down vs. sleeping

While some people will find it more convenient to just put their Mac to sleep when it’s not in use, shutting it down at the end of the day not only saves more power than the sleep mode but also gives it a chance to install pending updates that require a restart, flush the caches and perform other housekeeping operations as part of the general maintenance routine.

As I mentioned earlier, you may want to use power scheduling in macOS if you want to be sure your Mac turns off when you aren’t working and turns on before you come to work.

If FileVault is turned on

Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security and see if FileVault is turned On.

If it is On, your Mac will not log in to an account automatically, as FireVault security settings require you to manually enter the password every time your computer powers on or restarts.

Have you tried power scheduling on your Mac yet? If so, how did you like this feature? Do share your top uses for power scheduling in macOS with us in the comments down below.

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