pmset repeat: put your Mac's sleep and wake on a daily schedule

The schedule outlived its settings panel

Old Mac OS had a Schedule button in Energy Saver: start up or wake at 7:45 on weekdays, sleep at midnight. The panel is gone from System Settings; the mechanism underneath it is not. pmset repeat is that mechanism, driven directly.

sudo pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MTWRF 07:45:00

That is: every weekday at 07:45, wake the machine if it is asleep — or boot it if it is powered off, which is what distinguishes wakeorpoweron from plain wake.

The weekday string is documented in pmset(1) as any subset of MTWRFSU — Monday through Sunday, one letter each, R for Thursday and U for Sunday. M alone is valid; so is MTWRF; so is the full week.

Both halves of the old panel work, and they can be set in one line — this example is from the man page itself:

sudo pmset repeat wakeorpoweron T 12:00:00 sleep MTWRFSU 20:00:00

Cancelling is one command, and it clears every repeating rule:

sudo pmset repeat cancel

Verify what is actually armed

Never assume; the machine will tell you:

$ pmset -g sched
Scheduled power events:
 [0]  wake at 08/28/2026 21:22:55 by 'goguma'

pmset -g sched shows both kinds: repeating rules appear under their own heading when one is set, and every one-shot scheduled event is listed with an owner naming who armed it. If a wake fires that you do not recognise, the log names the reason and this list names the culprit.

The gotchas

One rule of each kind. There is a single repeating wake slot and a single repeating sleep slot. Setting a new rule replaces the old one silently. If you need Tuesday at 06:00 and Friday at 09:00, repeat cannot express it — that is one-shot territory.

Scheduled sleep is polite. The repeating sleep half will not force a machine down past active work — assertions held against sleep win, which is the same mechanism caffeinate uses in the other direction. Treat scheduled sleep as "start trying to sleep at 20:00", not as a guarantee.

Wake is a moment, not a state. The 07:45 wake brings the machine up; the ordinary sleep timers then apply. If nothing touches it, it drifts back to sleep on the usual idle schedule. A wake scheduled so a job can run needs the job to *hold* the machine awake for its duration, or the machine may not still be up when the job's real work starts.

Repeat expresses routines, not job schedules. A daily 07:45 wake is a routine. A crontab with jobs at 02:00, 03:30, and hourly-on-Sundays is not — expressing it as repeat rules is impossible, and arming one-shots for each fire time, forever, is a job for software rather than for a person. That is the half goguma automates: it reads the schedules you already have and keeps the next one-shot wake armed, so the standing-rule limitations stop mattering.

Common questions

How do I schedule my Mac to wake at the same time every day?

sudo pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 07:45:00 — the weekday string is any subset of MTWRFSU, so MTWRF is weekdays only. Verify with pmset -g sched.

Where did the Energy Saver schedule UI go?

Apple removed the Schedule panel from System Settings; the underlying mechanism remains and pmset repeat drives it directly.

What is the difference between pmset repeat and pmset schedule?

repeat sets one standing rule that fires every matching day. schedule arms a one-shot event at an absolute date and time, which is consumed when it fires. Repeating rules are for routines; one-shots are for waking before a particular job.

Can I schedule different wake times for different days?

Not with repeat alone — one repeating wake rule exists at a time, and setting a new one replaces it. Varying times per day means arming one-shot wakes with pmset schedule, and re-arming after each fire.