Apple quietly removed one of the most convenient power features when it redesigned System Settings in macOS Ventura. If you went looking for the old Energy Saver “Schedule” button — the one that let your Mac start up, shut down, or restart itself at set times — you probably discovered it is simply gone. The good news is that the underlying capability is still there. It just moved to the command line, where the pmset power management tool gives you even more control than the old graphical interface ever did.
In this guide, you will learn how to schedule automatic startup, shutdown, and restarts on macOS Ventura using pmset in Terminal. The process takes only a few minutes, and once set, your Mac will follow the schedule reliably day after day.
How to schedule startup and shutdown with pmset
Before you begin, it helps to know that Terminal lives in Applications > Utilities. If you rarely open it, our guide on how to quickly open the list of installed apps on macOS will get you there faster. Then follow these steps:
- Open Terminal. Go to Applications > Utilities and launch Terminal, or find it with Spotlight search.
- Check your current schedule. Type
pmset -g schedand press Enter. If nothing is scheduled yet, the output will be empty — that is completely normal. - Schedule a weekday wake-up. To power on or wake your Mac at 7:00 AM Monday through Friday, enter:
sudo pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MTWRF 07:00:00 - Schedule a weekday shutdown. To shut the Mac down at 7:00 PM on weekdays, enter:
sudo pmset repeat shutdown MTWRF 19:00:00 - Schedule automatic restarts (optional). To restart your Mac every night at midnight, enter:
sudo pmset repeat restart MTWRFSU 00:00:00 - Learn the format. The letters stand for days of the week: M (Monday), T (Tuesday), W (Wednesday), R (Thursday), F (Friday), S (Saturday), U (Sunday). Times use the 24-hour clock in HH:MM:SS format.
- Enter your administrator password. Every
sudocommand asks for your Mac login password. Type it — you will not see the characters as you type — and press Enter. - Verify the schedule. Run
pmset -g schedagain to confirm your new schedule is listed. - Cancel whenever you need to. To remove every scheduled event at once, run
sudo pmset repeat cancel.
Once your schedule is running, you might also enjoy giving your other Apple devices a personal touch — here is how to add and change the iPhone startup sound in iOS.
If it still doesn’t work
If your Mac ignores a scheduled shutdown, two culprits cover almost every case. First, a scheduled shutdown is skipped if the Mac is asleep when the target time arrives — wake events work from sleep, but a shutdown event will not wake a sleeping Mac just to turn it off. Second, macOS refuses to shut down while documents have unsaved changes, since that could lose your work. Save everything and try again. For deeper background on power management, see Apple’s Terminal User Guide and the power-management coverage at MacRumors.
Frequently asked questions
Can I schedule different times for weekends?
Yes. The day letters are fully flexible — use SU for Saturday and Sunday only, or list individual days such as MWF. Just run a separate pmset repeat command for each event you want.
Will a scheduled startup work if my Mac is completely shut down?
Yes — that is the whole point of the wakeorpoweron event. As long as your Mac is connected to power (important for MacBooks), it will power itself on at the scheduled time even from a fully shut-down state.
Conclusion
Losing the Schedule button in macOS Ventura was annoying, but pmset is arguably the better tool: it is scriptable, precise, and supports combinations the old interface never offered. Set your schedule once with the commands above, verify it with pmset -g sched, and your Mac will quietly take care of the rest.
