How to Delete Cache on Mac (System, App, and Browser Caches)

Caches are temporary files that apps and macOS itself write to speed things up later: a browser caching images so a page loads faster on your next visit, an app caching a rendered thumbnail instead of regenerating it every time. They’re deliberately disposable: deleting a cache doesn’t lose any of your data, it just means the app rebuilds that temporary file the next time it needs it. That also makes cache cleanup the safest, highest-value place to start freeing up disk space, well ahead of touching anything in Documents or Desktop.

Where Mac caches actually live

There are three distinct cache locations, and they behave differently:

~/Library/Caches holds per-app caches for everything you run: browsers, Slack, Spotify, Adobe apps, Xcode, and dozens of others you’ve probably forgotten you installed. This is almost always the largest of the three and the safest to clean.

/Library/Caches holds system-wide caches shared across all user accounts, used by some system services and apps installed for all users. It requires admin rights to touch.

/System/Library/Caches holds caches owned by macOS itself. Leave this alone. It’s protected by System Integrity Protection on modern macOS anyway, so you generally can’t delete it by accident even if you try, but it’s worth knowing the boundary.

The ~/Library folder is hidden by default in Finder. To get there manually: open Finder, hold Option, click the Go menu, and Library appears in the list.

What’s safe to delete, and what isn’t

Inside ~/Library/Caches, each subfolder is usually named after the app or its bundle identifier (com.google.Chrome, com.apple.dt.Xcode, etc.), which makes it possible to recognize what you’re looking at. As a rule:

Any folder for an app you have installed and can reopen afterward is safe to delete, since the app will simply rebuild what it needs. Be careful with folders for apps that are currently running: quit the app first rather than deleting its active cache out from under it. And leave anything under /System alone, along with any cache folder for software you don’t recognize without checking what it is first. Better safe than sorry.

Clearing browser caches specifically

Browsers deserve a special mention because they’re consistently one of the largest cache consumers, especially Chrome and its derivatives (Edge, Brave, Arc), which can accumulate several gigabytes of cached page assets over months of daily use.

Rather than deleting browser cache folders by hand, use the browser’s own clearing tool: it clears the cache cleanly without touching cookies or saved logins unless you ask it to.

Safari: Settings → Advanced → check “Show features for web developers,” then Develop menu → Empty Caches
Chrome: Settings → Privacy and security → Clear browsing data → check only “Cached images and files”
Firefox: Settings → Privacy & Security → Cookies and Site Data → Clear Data → check only “Cached Web Content”

This clears the cache without logging you out of every site, which is what happens if you also clear cookies alongside it.

Xcode’s caches are in a different league

If you do iOS or macOS development, Xcode’s caches deserve their own step, because they’re typically an order of magnitude larger than every other app’s cache combined. DerivedData (build intermediates and the search index, under ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData) regenerates automatically and is always safe to delete: Xcode rebuilds it the next time you open a project, it just takes a rebuild instead of an instant reopen.

Beyond DerivedData, Xcode also leaves iOS Simulator devices, test-run simulator clones (APFS copy-on-write clones created during UI testing, which don’t free the space you’d expect when deleted individually because they share disk blocks with each other), and Swift Package Manager caches. Together these routinely reach 15-20+ GB on a Mac that’s had Xcode installed for a few years. OverClean’s Xcode & Simulator Artifacts view breaks all of this into five clearly labeled groups rather than one folder you’d have to interpret by hand.

What happens if you delete the wrong thing

In practice, deleting a cache folder rarely breaks anything. That’s the entire design premise of a cache. The worst realistic outcome is that an app takes a little longer to reopen while it rebuilds what it needs (Xcode re-indexing a large project, or a browser re-fetching images on the next page load), not data loss. The one exception is deleting a cache folder while its app is actively running and mid-write to it, which can occasionally cause that specific app session to error out, another reason to quit an app before clearing its cache rather than doing it while the app is open.

This is different from deleting files in ~/Library/Application Support, which often does hold real data (saved projects, license activation state, local databases) and shouldn’t be treated the same way as a cache folder just because it lives in a similar-looking directory.

~/Library/Logs sits next to Caches in the same hidden Library folder and gets confused with it often, but it’s a distinct category: diagnostic text logs apps write for debugging, not temporary working data. Logs are also generally safe to delete and regenerate automatically, but they rarely reach the sizes caches do, a few hundred MB at most, versus caches which can run into the tens of gigabytes. Worth clearing in the same pass, but not where the real space is.

How often should you clear caches?

There’s no fixed schedule that makes sense for everyone: it depends on how much you install, browse, and develop. As a practical rule: if you’re not currently low on disk space, there’s no need to clear caches proactively at all, since they exist specifically to make things faster and clearing them trades that speed benefit away temporarily for no immediate gain. Clear them when you’re actually trying to reclaim space, or when a specific app’s cache has grown unusually large and is causing that app to misbehave (a bloated browser cache making page loads slower rather than faster, for instance).

The easier way to do all of this

Manually opening ~/Library/Caches, recognizing dozens of bundle-identifier-named folders, and deciding what’s safe is tedious and error-prone. It’s easy to skip something large because the folder name doesn’t obviously mean anything to you. A scanner that categorizes caches automatically and shows you real sizes turns this from a 20-minute archaeology project into a two-minute review.

Download OverClean to scan your Mac and see every cache category broken out by size. The free scan covers the Dashboard and category overview. Safe Deletion confirms before removing anything and routes through the Trash rather than deleting permanently, so a misclick doesn’t cost you anything.