Show or Hide the Day of the Week in the Mac Menu Bar

The abbreviated day — Mon, Tue, Wed — sits to the left of the Mac's menu bar clock by default. Some people rely on the glance; others see three characters of wasted space on an already-crowded bar. Either way it's one toggle, separate from the date setting, and it lives in the same Clock Options sheet on macOS 13 Ventura through 15 Sequoia.

Toggle the day of the week

1. Open System Settings → Control Center.
2. Scroll to the bottom and click Clock Options.
3. Turn Show the day of the week on or off.

The menu bar updates the moment you flip the switch. The toggle is on by default, and turning it back on later restores exactly what you had — nothing else about the clock changes.

Day and date are separate switches

It's easy to conflate the two, because they sit next to each other in the clock: Wed 2 Jul 09:41 is really three parts. Show the day of the week controls the Wed; the Show date dropdown just above it controls the 2 Jul; and the time itself is always shown. That means you can have any combination — date without day, day without date, or a bare clock showing only the time. If you hide both, the clock shrinks to something like 09:41, which is about as narrow as the digital style gets without switching to the analog face.

Why hide it — and why keep it

• Hide it if space is precious. On a notch MacBook the menu bar loses a big slice of its width to the camera housing, and macOS responds to crowding by silently hiding menu bar icons. Trimming four characters from the clock is one of the few free wins — no icon lost, no information you didn't already know. Most people are quite sure what day it is.
• Keep it if you write dates all day. Anyone scheduling meetings, naming files by date, or filling forms tends to appreciate day-plus-date in a single glance, and the cost on a 27-inch display is nothing.

There's no Terminal shortcut worth using here — the reliable route on all three current macOS versions is the Clock Options toggle, and it takes effect instantly with no Dock or Finder restart.

How the day is written

The abbreviation follows your system language and region from System Settings → General → Language & Region — an English system shows Mon, Tue, Wed; other languages show their own conventions. There's no option to spell the day out in full in the menu bar, and no way to reposition it; day, date, and time render in a fixed order. If you want richer calendar information at a glance, that's what Notification Center and desktop widgets are for — the menu bar clock is deliberately terse.

One more space note for notch MacBook owners: macOS never overlaps the notch, so when the left side's app menus and the right side's icons approach it, something has to give — and macOS gives by hiding menu bar icons entirely, with no visual hint that it did. Every character you shave off the clock delays that cliff. Day-of-week off, date on When Space Allows, and a digital style is the compact setup that still tells you the time and date most of the day.

More width-saving tricks

If you're hiding the day to rescue a crowded menu bar, the bigger lever is spacing: macOS accepts tighter padding between menu bar icons than the default. See how to tighten menu bar spacing to fit two or three more icons beside the notch.