Is it safe to delete ~/Library/Caches? Mostly yes, and mostly pointless

Guide · 5 min read · By Kapil Upadhyay at Logicspark · Published 10 September 2026 · Updated 12 September 2026

"Delete everything in ~/Library/Caches" is the most repeated piece of Mac storage advice in existence. It is safe. It is also, on most machines, close to useless.

Why it is safe

A cache is defined by being rebuildable. Applications write to ~/Library/Caches on the explicit understanding that the contents may vanish. Removing them costs you a slower next launch and occasionally a re-authentication. Nothing is lost that the application cannot recreate.

One practical caution: quit the applications first. Deleting a cache while its owner is running can leave the app writing into a directory that no longer exists, which is a good way to produce genuinely strange behaviour.

Why it rarely helps

Measure before you commit to it:

du -sh ~/Library/Caches
du -sh ~/Library/Application\ Support ~/Library/Containers ~/Library/Group\ Containers

On most Macs the first number is a few gigabytes at most. The second command routinely returns numbers an order of magnitude larger. Those folders are neighbours in the same directory, which is exactly why the advice spreads — they look interchangeable and are not.

The three-tier way to think about it

Rather than reasoning per folder, it is more reliable to reason per item, by what it costs you if you are wrong. Dustloft sorts everything it finds into exactly three tiers:

The useful property is that the tier travels with the item, not the folder. A cache inside Application Support is still regenerable; a message database inside it is not.

Caches that are actually large

A few are genuinely worth targeting, because they are both large and unambiguously regenerable: browser caches, ~/Library/Caches/Homebrew, package manager caches, and the media caches written by Adobe and DaVinci Resolve, which can reach tens of gigabytes on a machine used for video work.

Read next

If you are trying to account for a large System Data figure, the breakdown guide covers where the space usually is, and the step-by-step walkthrough works through it in order of size. The safety reference lists every location Dustloft refuses to touch and why.

Common questions

Is it safe to delete files in ~/Library/Caches?

Yes. By definition a cache is data an application can rebuild, so the worst outcome is an app being briefly slower or asking you to sign in again. Quit applications first so they do not rewrite entries while you are deleting.

Will deleting caches speed up my Mac?

Generally no. Caches exist to make things faster, so removing them usually makes the next few operations slower while they rebuild. Clear them to reclaim space or to resolve corrupted state, not for performance.

Why did deleting caches barely free any space?

Because the large folders are not caches. Application Support and Containers hold databases, message media and app data that no cleaner should treat as disposable, and they are usually many times the size of Caches.