How to change the time format and the look of the clock on a Mac

The phrase covers at least three unrelated jobs. Changing the clock can mean correcting a time that is running wrong, switching from 3:00 PM to 15:00, or turning the menu bar clock into something that shows the weekday and the seconds. The settings for those sit in three different panes, and on recent macOS one of them has moved.

Sorting out which one is meant takes a second and saves a lot of clicking, because the pane that holds the format has nothing to do with the pane that holds the time.

Three requests, three panes

What is meant by changing the clock	Where the setting is	Example
The displayed time is wrong	System Settings, General, Date & Time	Clock is an hour out after travel
The format should change	System Settings, Menu Bar, Clock Options	Add seconds, add the weekday, use an analog face
12-hour or 24-hour	System Settings, General, Date & Time	Show 15:00 instead of 3:00 PM

The third row is the one that catches people. It looks like a format question, so it gets searched for in the format pane, and it is not there.

Where the clock format settings moved

On macOS 27 the path is System Settings, then Menu Bar in the sidebar, then the Menu Bar Controls section, then the Clock Options button. On macOS 15 Sequoia and earlier the same button is reached through Control Center in the sidebar, under a section named Menu Bar Only.

This is why instructions found elsewhere often do not match the screen. A guide written against Ventura, Sonoma or Sequoia sends the reader to Control Center, and on macOS 27 the clock controls are no longer there. Apple's own page on changing the menu bar clock format has a version selector at the top, and switching it changes the instructions rather than just the screenshots.

Whichever release is running, the sheet that opens is the same, with a Date group and a Time group.

What the Clock Options sheet actually controls

The Date group has two settings.

Show date is a pop-up with three values rather than a switch. When Space Allows displays the date only while the menu bar has room for it, which is the behaviour most people already have without knowing it is a setting. Always keeps the date there permanently. Never removes it, leaving the time alone.

Show the day of the week places the weekday in front of the date. It only has an effect while the date is being displayed.

The Time group has more.

Style chooses between a digital and an analog clock. Apple's documentation states plainly that if the analog display is chosen, the remaining options for the time display are unavailable.

Show AM/PM adds AM or PM after the time. Flash the time separators turns the colon on and off at one-second intervals. Display the time with seconds changes the format from Hours:Minutes to Hours:Minutes:Seconds.

Announce the time is the outlier in the list, because it changes nothing visible. Turning it on reveals an Interval pop-up with three choices, on the hour, on the half hour and on the quarter hour, and a Voice pop-up. A Customize Voice button opens controls for speaking rate, pitch, volume, timbre and sentence pause. It is the only clock setting on a Mac that works with the screen off, which makes it the one worth trying for anyone who loses track of time inside a full screen app where the menu bar is hidden.

The order of these settings on screen is not the order in which they matter. Show date and Display the time with seconds are the two that change how much width the clock takes, and the rest cost nothing. Anyone working on a laptop screen is effectively choosing between information in the clock and icons elsewhere in the bar, so it is worth deciding those two deliberately and leaving the others alone.

The analog trade-off

Choosing the analog style is not purely cosmetic. It disables seconds, AM/PM and the flashing separator in one move, and it removes the variable width of a digital clock. A digital clock showing a weekday, a date and seconds can occupy a noticeable slice of the bar and the slice changes length through the day. The analog face is a fixed, narrow square. On a crowded menu bar that difference is often worth more than the readability that is given up.

Changing the time itself and the time zone

Everything above is display. The time being displayed is set in System Settings, General, Date & Time.

Apple's recommended arrangement is to turn on Set time and date automatically, click Set, enter a network time server for the region, then click Done, and to turn on Set time zone automatically using your current location. The automatic time zone depends on Location Services being on, which is the usual reason a Mac that travels keeps showing the previous city.

Setting the time by hand means turning the automatic switch off first. Only then does the Set button accept a date and a time. The same applies to the zone: turn off the automatic setting, then type a city into the field at the bottom and press Return. The field takes a city name rather than a zone name, and Apple's guidance for a city that is not listed is to choose another city in the same zone.

The 24-hour switch lives in this pane too, labelled 24-hour time, described by Apple as using a 24-hour format for the time shown in the menu bar, so that 3:00 PM appears as 15:00.

The date format is a region setting

Changing whether the date reads as day then month then year is handled in a third place: System Settings, General, then Language & Region. The Region pop-up selects a geographic region and with it a set of date, time and number formats. Below it, individual formats can be adjusted, including Calendar, First day of week, Date format and Number format.

This is a system-wide change rather than a menu bar one, so it also affects how dates appear in Finder, Mail and most apps. For a reader who only wants the menu bar to read differently, adjusting the Show date pop-up is the smaller move. For a reader whose Mac is displaying dates in the wrong order everywhere, the Region setting is the right lever.

The other clocks that can be changed

The menu bar clock is not the only one. Apple's overview of clocks on the Mac lists four destinations, and each is changed somewhere different.

Clock	Where it is changed	What can be altered
Menu bar	Menu Bar settings, Clock Options	Format, date, weekday, seconds, analog or digital
Desktop or Notification Center widget	Control-click the widget, Edit "Clock"	City, order of cities in a World Clock widget
Screen saver and Lock Screen	Lock Screen settings	Whether a large clock is shown
Clock app	The app itself, World Clock tab	Which cities are listed and in what order

The widget route is the practical answer to a request the menu bar cannot serve, which is a second time zone kept permanently in view. In the Clock app, World Clock is chosen at the top of the window or through View, then World Clock, and cities are added with the plus button in the top-right corner, reordered by dragging, and removed by holding the pointer over a clock and clicking the control that appears in its top-left corner. The same list drives the City and World Clock widgets, which can be placed on the desktop and edited by control-clicking and choosing Edit "Clock".

The screen saver clock is the one to reach for when the complaint is legibility rather than information. It is a single switch in Lock Screen settings and it costs nothing in menu bar width, because it only appears when nothing else is happening on the screen.

What cannot be changed

Three limits are worth knowing before time is spent hunting for a setting that does not exist.

There is no custom format string for the menu bar clock. The choices are the ones in the Clock Options sheet, and arrangements outside that list, such as the date before the time or a month spelled in full, are not offered. The nearest lever is the Region setting in Language & Region, which changes the whole system rather than the clock alone.

There is no second time zone in the menu bar clock. The bar shows one zone, taken from Date & Time. Anything showing two is a third party app with its own menu bar item.

The clock cannot be removed. Apple's documentation for Menu Bar settings states it directly: the clock is always shown in the menu bar. Every other item in that list can be switched off, and the clock cannot. The most that can be done is to shrink it, by setting Show date to Never and leaving seconds off, or by choosing the analog style.

When the clock looks wrong rather than being wrong

Three complaints come up repeatedly and none of them are solved in Clock Options.

The clock is dim. Apple documents this precisely: the menu bar clock is dimmed when a Focus is active and the Focus status menu is not shown in the menu bar. The fix is to open Menu Bar settings, select Focus, and choose either Always Show or Show When Active from its pop-up. The clock returns to full strength because the state it was signalling is now visible elsewhere.

The date disappeared. With Show date set to When Space Allows, the date is dropped whenever the menu bar runs short of room, which usually happens on switching to an app with a long row of menus. The setting is behaving correctly. Either set it to Always, or take width back from the right side of the bar.

Icons vanished after adding seconds. Adding seconds and the weekday widens the clock item permanently, and the menu bar has no overflow. When the app menus on the left expand, status items on the right are simply not drawn, without a warning or a list to reach them from. On MacBook models with a notch there is less width to begin with, so the effect starts sooner.

That last one is the trade nobody is told about. A richer clock is paid for in icons that stop appearing. The width can be recovered either by removing status items that are watched rather than used, or by keeping the rarely used ones behind a divider with a menu bar organizer. For a reader deciding whether that is worth installing, the comparison of the available tools lays out how they differ.

What to change first

Open Clock Options and set Show date to Always if the date matters, then add seconds or the weekday only if either gets read rather than glanced past. If the menu bar starts dropping icons afterwards, take the width back before giving up the format, either by trimming status items or by tidying the bar with Koffret.