How to Clear the Cache on Your Mac (Safely)

There’s a strange piece of folk wisdom around Mac caches — that clearing them speeds up your computer. It usually doesn’t. What clearing caches does is free up disk space, sometimes a lot of it. The performance impact is mostly negative right after, then neutral once apps rebuild what they need.

If your goal is speed, look elsewhere. If your goal is reclaiming the 15-40GB sitting in cache folders, this is the right guide.

The three cache locations on a Mac

There are three folders macOS uses for caches. Each behaves a little differently:

• ~/Library/Caches/ — your user-level app caches. Largest by far on most Macs.
• /Library/Caches/ — system-wide caches. Smaller. Needs admin password to clear.
• ~/Library/Containers/<bundle id>/Data/Library/Caches/ — caches for sandboxed apps (App Store apps, most newer apps). Spread across many folders.

Plus a fourth location nobody talks about: /private/var/folders/. This is where macOS keeps its own working caches. Never touch this — macOS manages it, and clearing it manually breaks things in unpredictable ways.

How to actually open Caches

Finder hides the user Library folder by default. Easiest way in:

1. Open Finder
2. Hit Cmd+Shift+G (Go → Go to Folder)
3. Paste ~/Library/Caches/
4. Press Enter

You’ll see a list of folders, mostly named after apps using their bundle identifiers (com.spotify.client, com.tinyspeck.slackmacgap, etc.). Click View → as List, then click the Size column header to sort biggest first. If sizes don’t show, hit Cmd+J and enable “Calculate all sizes.”

The biggest folders are usually:

• Spotify (audio cache, often 4-8GB)
• Adobe apps
• Slack
• Microsoft Teams or Outlook
• Browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Brave)
• Any video editor (Final Cut, DaVinci Resolve, Premiere)

What’s safe to delete

Inside ~/Library/Caches/, every folder is technically safe to delete. Apps treat their cache as disposable by definition — that’s why it’s called cache. Worst case scenarios:

• Spotify rebuilds your offline track cache (annoying but not catastrophic)
• Slack re-fetches recent messages (fast on a modern connection)
• Photoshop rebuilds its preview thumbnails (slow on first launch)
• Browser caches rebuild as you use them (briefly slower page loads)

What you do NOT want to do is delete ~/Library/Application Support/. Looks similar in name. Completely different content. Application Support is your real app data — your Slack history, your iMovie projects, your saved game files.

The trick to telling them apart: cache files are deletable without losing user data. Application Support files are user data.

Skip the manual huntSweep finds every cache, log, and forgotten file in seconds — and only removes what you OK. Download Sweep free →

The right sequence for clearing caches

Don’t just open Caches and start dragging. Quit the related apps first, otherwise you might delete files an app is actively writing to and corrupt its state.

1. Quit every running app. Cmd+Q for each. Or use Activity Monitor and quit anything non-essential.
2. Open ~/Library/Caches/.
3. Drag the contents to the Trash. You can select all (Cmd+A) and drag, or pick the biggest folders.
4. Open /Library/Caches/ (system-wide). Drag contents to Trash. macOS will prompt for your admin password.
5. Empty the Trash.
6. Restart. This clears active caches in memory and helps macOS rebuild a clean state.

Don’t skip the restart. Some apps keep cached data in memory and write it back to disk on quit, so clearing the folder while the app’s state is in RAM doesn’t actually help.

Browser caches need their own treatment

Browsers maintain caches in two places: the regular ~/Library/Caches/ folder AND inside their profile folder. Clearing one without the other doesn’t free much.

Chrome:

• Settings → Privacy and Security → Clear Browsing Data
• Choose “All time” and check “Cached images and files”
• For deeper cleaning, also clear ~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Cache/ manually

Safari:

• Enable Develop menu: Safari → Settings → Advanced → “Show Develop menu in menu bar”
• Develop → Empty Caches
• For website data: Safari → Settings → Privacy → Manage Website Data → Remove All

Firefox:

• Settings → Privacy & Security → Cookies and Site Data → Clear Data
• Check “Cached Web Content”

Edge / Brave / Arc: same approach as Chrome (they’re all Chromium-based). Look for “Clear Browsing Data” in settings.

The hidden font cache problem

If you’ve installed and removed a lot of fonts (especially during a Photoshop or Illustrator phase), your font caches can get genuinely huge — and corrupted font caches cause weird display issues across the system.

To clear:

sudo atsutil databases -remove

Then restart. macOS rebuilds the font cache from scratch. This sometimes also fixes display glitches in apps that use lots of fonts.

Sandboxed app caches (the tedious one)

Apps from the Mac App Store, plus most newer third-party apps, store their caches inside ~/Library/Containers/<bundle id>/Data/Library/Caches/ — buried two folders deeper than the regular Caches location.

You can navigate to ~/Library/Containers/, sort by size, and then dig into the biggest folders to find their inner Caches subfolders. It’s tedious. There are easily 100+ subfolders here.

Honestly, if you’re going to do containers manually, prioritize the biggest folders only. Or skip containers entirely — they’re usually a small fraction of total cache space compared to ~/Library/Caches/.

Let Sweep do this in one clickManual cleanup takes an hour. Sweep does it in 90 seconds, with a preview before anything’s removed. Get Sweep — free for Mac →

What you should never delete

Some folders look like caches but aren’t. Don’t touch:

• ~/Library/Application Support/ (mentioned above — real app data)
• ~/Library/Mail/V10/MailData/ — your local mail (delete only the Envelope Index if you specifically want Mail to rebuild)
• ~/Library/Containers/ (the parent — only the inner Caches subfolder is safe)
• ~/Library/Mobile Documents/ — your iCloud Drive
• /System/Library/Caches/ — protected by SIP anyway
• Anything in /private/var/folders/ — macOS’s working files

Also: don’t run “rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/” in Terminal. Drag-to-Trash gives you a recovery path. Direct rm gives you nothing. Maybe overkill paranoia, but the time savings of using rm aren’t worth the risk if you typo something.

How often should you clear caches?

Honestly, not often. Cache exists because apps benefit from it — clearing it daily means your apps run slower most of the time as they constantly rebuild caches.

Reasonable cadence:

• Quarterly if you’re tight on disk space or have noticed a specific app’s cache ballooning
• Annually if storage isn’t a concern
• Right after uninstalling a heavy app (Adobe, Final Cut Pro, Xcode) — the cache often persists

The exception is if you’re troubleshooting a specific issue. Mail not displaying messages right? Clearing Mail’s caches often helps. Photoshop showing wrong thumbnails? Cache. Browser pages rendering weirdly after a site update? Cache. In those cases, cache clearing is a real fix.

A reasonable expectation for what you’ll free

For a Mac that’s never had its caches cleared, expect to free:

• 5-15GB from ~/Library/Caches/
• 0.5-2GB from /Library/Caches/
• 1-5GB from container caches
• 2-8GB from browser caches
• 5-20GB from Mail attachments (if you use Apple Mail heavily)

Total: somewhere between 15GB and 50GB on a typical neglected machine. Less if you’ve cleaned recently. More if you have heavy caching apps like Spotify, Adobe Creative Cloud, or Xcode.

The thing to remember: clearing caches isn’t permanent. Apps rebuild them as you use them, and within a few weeks, you’re often back to where you started. It’s maintenance, not a fix. Build it into your routine the same way you’d clear out Downloads or empty the Trash.