How to disable Power Nap on Mac

Power Nap is a macOS feature that wakes your Mac periodically during sleep to check email, sync iCloud Drive, run Spotlight indexing, and trigger Time Machine backups — all without the screen turning on. It sounds helpful, but it drains battery, generates unexpected fan spin-up, and means your Mac is never quite fully asleep. Here's how to turn it off.

What Power Nap actually does

When your Mac is asleep, Power Nap wakes the system (at an interval macOS decides) to perform background tasks: fetching new Mail messages, syncing Notes and Reminders, updating Calendar, pulling down iCloud Drive changes, and firing Time Machine backups. On desktops and laptops connected to power this happens frequently. On battery, Apple throttles it, but it still runs.

For most people the sync delay of a few seconds when you wake the Mac is unnoticeable, which means Power Nap is saving battery for zero practical benefit. If you close your MacBook at night and open it to a warm fan in the morning, Power Nap is likely the culprit.

How to disable Power Nap via System Settings

1. Open System Settings from the Apple menu or Dock.
2. Click Battery in the sidebar.
3. On macOS Ventura (13) and later, click the Options button near the bottom of the Battery pane.
4. Find Enable Power Nap and turn the toggle off.
5. On macOS Monterey (12) and earlier, the setting appears directly inside the Battery pane under the Battery and Power Adapter tabs — turn it off in both tabs if you want it fully disabled.

The change takes effect immediately. No restart needed.

How to disable Power Nap via Terminal

If you prefer the command line — or want to script this across multiple Macs — pmset handles Power Nap with a single flag.

Check the current state

# check whether Power Nap is on (1) or off (0)
pmset -g | grep powernap

Disable it

# turn off Power Nap for all power sources
sudo pmset -a powernap 0

Re-enable it

# restore Power Nap to on
sudo pmset -a powernap 1

As with all pmset changes, the -a flag applies to both AC and battery. Use -c to target the power adapter only, or -b for battery only — useful if you want background syncing when plugged in but not when on battery.

# disable Power Nap on battery only
sudo pmset -b powernap 0

# keep it on when plugged in
sudo pmset -c powernap 1

Confirm the change

# verify powernap is now 0
pmset -g | grep powernap

Power Nap vs. Wake for network access

Power Nap is not the only setting that can wake your Mac during sleep. There is also Wake for network access (shown as womp in pmset -g), which lets the Mac respond to certain network traffic while sleeping — used by features like Find My Mac and screen sharing. If you want the Mac to stay completely dark, disable this too:

# disable Wake for network access
sudo pmset -a womp 0

# to restore
sudo pmset -a womp 1

Will disabling Power Nap break anything?

For the vast majority of users, no. Mail, iCloud, Calendar, Reminders, and Time Machine all sync within seconds of you waking the Mac — the delay is imperceptible. The only scenario where Power Nap earns its keep is if you need your Mac to have processed new emails or file changes before you open the lid, without any wake delay. That's a narrow use case. If it applies to you, leave Power Nap on for the power adapter and disable it only on battery.