How to Hide the Red Notification Badges on Dock Icons (Mac)

The red circle on a Dock icon — Mail claiming 3,481 unread, Slack demanding attention, App Store nagging about updates — is the loudest quiet feature on the Mac. The good news: you can remove it for any app without touching its notifications. The catch: macOS makes you do it one app at a time. Here's the exact switch, plus the broader options when badges are only part of the noise.

Turn off the badge for one app

1. Open System Settings → Notifications.
2. Scroll the app list and click the offender — say, Mail.
3. Turn off Badge application icon.

The red circle disappears from that app's Dock icon immediately, and stays gone until you flip the switch back. Everything else about the app's notifications — banners, sounds, Notification Center history — keeps working exactly as before. The steps are identical on Ventura, Sonoma, and Sequoia.

To undo it, return to the same screen and turn Badge application icon back on. Nothing is lost in the meantime; the app keeps counting in the background and the badge reappears with the current number.

There is no global off switch

macOS offers no single toggle that hides every badge at once, and no supported defaults command for it either — the setting lives per app inside the notifications database. So the practical approach is triage. Work through the handful of apps whose counts you never act on:

• Mail — the classic offender. If you live at inbox four-digits, the count is pure decoration.
• Messages — useful for most people; disable only if you read messages on your phone anyway.
• Slack, Teams, Discord — chat badges recount constantly and rarely tell you anything a banner didn't.
• App Store and System Settings — update reminders you'll get to when you get to them.

Five minutes of this usually silences ninety percent of the red on your Dock, while the badges you keep — calendar invites, two-factor prompts — become genuinely meaningful again.

One wrinkle to know: a few cross-platform apps don't use Apple's notification system for their count at all — they draw the number straight onto their own Dock icon. If a badge survives the System Settings switch, look in the app's own preferences instead; Slack and Discord, for example, both ship their own badge controls that work independently of macOS. Between the two switches, every red circle on the Dock has an off button somewhere.

When the real problem is bigger than badges

If you're turning off badges because notifications in general are eating your attention, consider aiming higher up the chain. A Focus mode (System Settings → Focus) silences banners and sounds on a schedule or on demand, and you can allow specific people and apps through. Note the distinction, though: Focus quiets the interruptions, but it doesn't remove badge counts from the Dock — the per-app Badge application icon switch is the only thing that does that. The two work well together: Focus for your deep-work hours, badge triage for the apps that never deserved a red circle in the first place.

And if a badge seems stuck — showing a count with nothing actually pending — that's usually the app's own bookkeeping, not macOS. Opening the app and letting it sync, or quitting and relaunching it, clears a stale badge far more often than any settings change.

Finally, remember the badge toggle is per-Mac, not synced: turning off Mail's badge on your MacBook does nothing on your desktop Mac or your iPhone. If you want quiet everywhere, you'll need to repeat the switch on each device — five minutes well spent, once.

Clean up the rest of the Dock

Badges gone, you might notice the other small clutter: the dots under running apps. See how to hide the Dock's indicator lights for a fully quiet strip.