Show the battery percentage on a MacBook

The little battery icon in your MacBook's menu bar tells you roughly how much charge is left — but "roughly" isn't enough when you're deciding whether to grab your charger. To put the exact number on screen, open System Settings → Control Center → Battery and turn on Show Percentage. The figure appears right inside the battery glyph, and it's a single toggle you set once.

Turn on the percentage

On macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia, the switch lives in Control Center settings:

1. Open System Settings from the Apple menu.
2. Click Control Center in the sidebar.
3. Scroll down to the Battery section.
4. Turn on Show Percentage.

The number appears immediately, printed inside the battery icon at the right end of the menu bar. To turn it back off, return to the same spot and switch Show Percentage off — the icon stays, just without the digits. There's no restart or logout involved.

Where the number shows up

Apple prints the percentage inside the battery outline itself, so it stays compact and doesn't eat menu-bar space the way a separate label would. As the charge drops, both the fill level and the number move together, and when you plug in, a small lightning bolt joins them to show it's charging. If your menu bar is crowded and the battery icon has been pushed behind the notch on a newer MacBook, you'll find the same reading — percentage included — by opening Control Center from the menu bar.

One thing worth knowing: the percentage reflects your Mac's own estimate of remaining charge, which it recalibrates constantly. Small jumps — say 2% at once — are normal as macOS refines the reading, especially right after unplugging or waking from sleep.

Prefer the Terminal?

The same setting has a defaults key if you'd rather script it or flip it from the command line. It writes the identical preference that the toggle does:

# Show the battery percentage, then relaunch Control Center
defaults write com.apple.controlcenter BatteryShowPercentage -bool true
killall ControlCenter

# Undo — hide the percentage again
defaults write com.apple.controlcenter BatteryShowPercentage -bool false
killall ControlCenter

For most people the System Settings toggle is the easier route — the command is here only if you're setting up several Macs at once or automating a fresh install. Either way the result is the same reading in the same place.

See how long the charge will last

The percentage tells you how full the battery is; a time estimate tells you how long it'll last at your current pace. Our guide on showing time remaining on Mac covers where that lives now that it left the menu bar.