“Notifications Are Turned Off for Claude” — Here Is the Fix

You've seen the little banner: "Notifications are turned off for Claude. Enable them in System Settings to get alerts when Claude finishes a task." It sounds simple enough — and then you open System Settings, scroll past forty apps, and wonder which toggle it actually means, why the alerts still don't arrive afterwards, and whether the same fix covers Claude Code running in your terminal. This post walks through the whole thing in order: what the message means, the exact clicks to fix it, and the second layer of settings (Focus modes, terminal apps) that silently eat notifications even after you flip the switch.

What the message actually means

macOS treats notification permission per app. The first time an app tries to notify you, macOS asks; if you dismissed that prompt, chose "Don't Allow," or never saw it, the app lands in the blocked state — and Claude shows you that banner every time it wants to tell you a task finished. Nothing is broken. Claude is doing the work fine; macOS is just not letting it speak.

The fix on macOS, step by step

1. Open the Apple menu () in the top-left corner and choose System Settings.
2. Click Notifications in the sidebar (on older macOS versions this lives in System Preferences → Notifications & Focus).
3. Scroll the app list until you find Claude and click it.
4. Turn on Allow notifications.
5. Pick an alert style: Banners appear briefly and slide away; Alerts stay on screen until you dismiss them. If you tend to step away from your desk while Claude works, choose Alerts — a banner you never saw is the same as no notification.

That's the whole first layer. Trigger a quick task in Claude and you should get a ping when it finishes. If notifications still don't show up, keep reading — one of the layers below is swallowing them.

Layer two: Focus modes and Do Not Disturb

The most common reason notifications stay silent after enabling them is a Focus mode. If the moon icon in the menu bar is lit, Do Not Disturb or a custom Focus is active, and macOS will quietly suppress Claude's alerts along with everything else. You have two options: turn the Focus off while Claude works, or open System Settings → Focus, choose the mode you use, and add Claude to its list of allowed apps. If you use Screen mirroring or presentation mode, note that macOS pauses notifications there too — a classic surprise during long pairing sessions.

Running Claude Code in a terminal? Fix the terminal app instead

Here is the part that trips up almost everyone. When you use Claude Code in a terminal, the desktop notification doesn't come from an app called Claude — it comes from your terminal application. macOS permissions follow the app that posts the notification, so the toggle you need belongs to Terminal, iTerm2, Warp, Ghostty, or Visual Studio Code — whichever one Claude Code runs inside.

• In System Settings → Notifications, find your terminal app and allow notifications for it, same steps as above.
• iTerm2 has its own layer on top: check Settings → Profiles → Terminal → Notification Center alerts, and make sure "Silence bell" isn't suppressing the alert channel Claude Code uses.
• Inside Claude Code itself, run /config and check the notification channel setting — if it's set to notifications_disabled, no macOS toggle will help until you switch it back to a terminal bell or notification option.

For a deeper tour of every alert Claude Code can send — including hooks that fire when it's waiting for your input rather than finished — see our complete Claude Code notifications guide and the waiting-for-input hook walkthrough.

Why the built-in alerts are only half the answer

Suppose every toggle is now green. There's still a structural limit: macOS notifications reach you only while you're at that Mac. Claude's longest tasks — big refactors, research runs, batch jobs — are exactly the ones you leave the desk for. A banner that fired on a screen you weren't looking at hasn't solved the real problem: knowing the moment Claude is done, wherever you are.

If you mostly want to stop babysitting the terminal between prompts, our post on a workflow that doesn't involve watching the terminal pairs well with this fix.

Quick reference: the full checklist

1. System Settings → Notifications → Claude → Allow notifications.
2. Alert style set to Alerts (not just Banners) if you step away.
3. Focus / Do Not Disturb off, or Claude added to allowed apps.
4. Using Claude Code in a terminal? Allow notifications for the terminal app (Terminal, iTerm2, Warp, Ghostty, VS Code) instead.
5. Check /config in Claude Code so its own notification channel isn't disabled.
6. Want alerts that follow you off the desk? Route them to your phone.

Five minutes of settings now buys back every "wait, did it finish?" terminal check from here on. Worth it.