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Schedule your Mac to wake or start up at a set time — via SS64

Commandlow riskNeeds adminmacOS 14 Sonoma and later

pmset can wake or power on your Mac on a schedule, for example every weekday morning before you sit down, so it's ready and has finished its updates and backups.

Takes effect right away

The easy way

  1. Days are letters: M T W R F S U (R is Thursday, U is Sunday). The example wakes or starts the Mac at 7:30 every weekday.
  2. Run pmset -g sched to see what's scheduled.

Command

Run in Terminal (Applications › Utilities). It uses sudo, so macOS asks for your password.

sudo pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MTWRF 07:30:00

Undo

sudo pmset repeat cancel
pmset needs administrator rights to change settings; reading the schedule doesn't.

Sources

Source reviewed
2026-11-02
Link checked
2026-11-02
Tested hands-on
Not by Oddbyte.Me

Oddbyte.Me hasn't tried this on every macOS version, so keep the undo handy.

pmsetschedulewakepower onautomation

More in Performance & Power

Check memory pressure, not 'free RAM' — via Apple Support

Tricklow risk

A Mac that shows almost no free memory is usually fine: macOS keeps recently used files cached in RAM so apps reopen faster. The number that matters is the Memory Pressure graph in Activity Monitor, which combines free memory, swap and cached files.