Is my MacBook charging?

How to tell if it’s charging

• The battery menu: click the battery icon in the menu bar. It shows the charge, the power source, the time until full while charging, and messages like Charging On Hold, Charged to 80% Limit, Battery Is Not Charging or Slow Charger.
• The MagSafe light (MagSafe 3): amber while charging, green when the battery is full.
• Battery settings: System Settings, Battery. The Last 24 Hours graph shades the periods when it was charging.
• Terminal: pmset -g batt prints a line such as “82%; charging; 0:45 remaining” (time until full), “discharging”, or “AC attached; not charging”.

What each message means, and what to do

Charging On Hold

Optimized Battery Charging (macOS Big Sur and later) learns your daily routine and delays charging past 80% when it expects the Mac to stay plugged in for a long time, aiming to be full when you usually unplug. While it waits, the battery menu says Charging On Hold. The point is to slow battery aging.

What to do: nothing, usually. Need it full now? Choose Charge to Full Now in the battery menu. To turn the feature off, open System Settings, Battery, click the Info button next to Battery Health and turn off Optimized Battery Charging.

Charged to 80% Limit

On macOS Tahoe 26.4 or later, Macs with Apple silicon have a Charge Limit between 80% and 100% in Battery settings. The Mac charges to within a few points of the limit and stops, and starts again if the charge drops more than 5% while plugged in. Both features occasionally charge to 100% to keep the battery estimate accurate.

What to do: raise the limit, or use Charge to Full Now once.

Not Charging

Apple gives three reasons:

• Battery health: the Mac paused charging to make the battery last longer, and may let it fall to around 93% before charging again.
• The power source is too weak: the adapter can run the Mac but not charge it. Apple says that then it won’t charge even while the Mac is off or asleep.
• Heavy work: video editing, games and other demanding apps can use more power than the adapter supplies, so the battery can even go down while plugged in.

Heat can stop it too: Apple says charging may stop at 80% when the battery is warmer than recommended. Take the Mac out of any case and keep it in the 10° to 35° C (50° to 95° F) range Apple gives.

Charging so slowly

On macOS Tahoe 26.4 or later, a Slow Charger label appears in the battery menu and above the Battery Level graph in Battery settings when the charger delivers too little power for your Mac model. On any version you can check the wattage yourself: hold Option, choose System Information from the Apple menu, click Power and look for Wattage under AC Charger Information.

What to do: use an adapter that provides at least the wattage Apple recommends for your model; a small phone charger may not keep up. Use a cable designed for charging, since not all USB-C cables are. Fast charging needs a specific adapter and cable combination on the models that support it. Quitting heavy apps leaves more of the adapter’s power for the battery.

Not charging at all

Apple’s checklist, in order:

• Check the port, cable and adapter for damage, try another cable, and try another outlet with a device you know works.
• Unplug the adapter for 60 seconds, then plug it back in, in case of line noise from other equipment on the circuit.
• Restart the Mac (Apple silicon), or reset the SMC (Intel), and install macOS updates.
• If it still won’t charge, run Apple Diagnostics and contact Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider.

Apple silicon and Intel Macs

• Charge Limit is for Macs with Apple silicon on macOS Tahoe 26.4 or later. Optimized Battery Charging works on both, from macOS Big Sur.
• Resetting power behavior: on Apple silicon, restart. On Intel, reset the System Management Controller (SMC), which manages charging there.

Keep an eye on it from the menu bar

The system battery icon shows a bolt while charging; you click it for the rest. Multimeter keeps more of it on screen:

• A battery meter shows the charge with a bolt while charging. Its menu starts with the reading in words: “Charging, 1:05 until full”, “On power adapter” when it’s plugged in but not charging (on hold or at a limit), or “Fully charged”.
• The Time Until face shows the time until full while charging. When charging is on hold there’s no real estimate, so it shows the percentage instead of 0:00.
• Power draw shows how many watts the Mac is using. On Apple silicon MacBooks it reads plugged in or not; on Intel MacBooks only on battery. Compare it with the charger’s wattage from System Information: when the Mac uses nearly all of it, little is left to charge the battery.

Multimeter doesn’t show the charger’s wattage, and it never changes how the battery charges. Battery meters turn yellow below 20% and red below 10% by default, with an optional notification. Five live meters use about 3% CPU, and they pause while the displays sleep.