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

Guide · 5 min read · Updated 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.

Folder	What it really holds	Safe to bulk delete?
~/Library/Caches	Rebuildable working data	Yes
~/Library/Application Support	App databases, settings, libraries	No
~/Library/Containers	Sandboxed app data, mail downloads	No
~/Library/Group Containers	Messaging media and shared app data	No

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:

Tier	Meaning	Handling
Regenerable	Rebuilds itself the next time it is needed	Safe to select in bulk
Needs admin	Safe to remove, but macOS asks for your password	Batched into one prompt
Permanent	Cannot be recovered	Never bulk-selected; each item confirmed individually

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. The safety reference lists every location Dustloft refuses to touch and why.