How to Set App Time Limits on iPhone — Screen Time in About 10 Minutes

If you searched for how to set an app time limit on iPhone, you want to know which buttons to press, not a comparison. This article is only the setup steps. For what Screen Time can and cannot do next to third-party blockers, see Screen Time vs app blockers.

One complication as of September 2026: iOS 27 shipped on 14 September and rebuilt the Screen Time settings screen. The steps below cover both layouts, starting with what to decide before you open Settings at all.

Decide three things first

Skip this and you will stall halfway through the setup screen.

Decision	How to decide	Why it matters
Which apps to limit	Three at most, starting with last week’s biggest time sink	Limit ten and you’ll switch everything off tomorrow
Which window to protect	One only — either evenings or working hours	Set both at once and you can’t tell which one failed
What stays available	Phone, messages, maps, payments, alarm clock	Break these and inconvenience wins within days

You can change the minutes later, so start with “a bit less than now.”

Turn on Screen Time

Nothing else works until activity tracking is on.

1. Open the Settings app and tap Screen Time
2. On iOS 27, tap Screen Time Schedule, Time Allowances, or Manage Screen Time, then tap Turn On App & Website Activity
3. On iOS 26 and earlier, tap App & Website Activity and turn it on

Once it’s on, tap Daily Average for your report and switch between Week and Day; scroll down for Pickups and Notifications. Check last week before picking your three apps — the list is rarely the one you expected.

Set how long you can use apps

This is the part people actually search for, and it is where the two iOS versions diverge most.

On iOS 27, daily caps live under Time Allowances, organised by category — Entertainment, Games and Social Media by default.

1. Tap Screen Time > Time Allowances
2. Drag the slider to raise or lower the total time you can spend on your device
3. Tap a category under Time Allowances, then drag its slider to cap that category
4. Tap Manage Categories to add a category, or to see your average daily use of a category and of the apps inside it
5. To make allowances apply only during certain parts of your day, turn on Match Screen Time Schedule

Apple notes that when an app declares an associated website, the allowance covers the website too — closing the old gap where a blocked app was still reachable in the browser.

On iOS 26 and earlier, the same job is done by App Limits.

1. Tap Screen Time > App Limits > Add Limit
2. Choose one or more categories. To limit an individual app, tap the category name to expand it and pick the app from inside
3. Tap Next, then set the allowed time
4. Tap Customize Days to vary the limit by day of the week

If you select several apps or categories in one limit, the time applies to all of them combined. Build separate limits at first.

Schedule when apps are available

A daily cap alone means you can burn the whole allowance before lunch. To protect a specific window, use a schedule.

On iOS 27:

1. Tap Screen Time > Screen Time Schedule, then turn on Schedule
2. Tap Add Schedule, pick the days of the week, then confirm
3. Tap the Time Window to rename it, change the start or stop time, or choose which Time Allowance categories are available during it
4. Use Delete this Time Window to remove one

On iOS 26 and earlier, tap Screen Time > Downtime, then either Turn On Downtime Until Tomorrow or Scheduled, and set Every Day or Customize Days with a start and end time. Apple sends a reminder five minutes before downtime begins — that’s your window to finish what you’re reading.

Fill in Always Allowed before you block anything

Whatever your iOS version, tap Screen Time > Always Allowed. On iOS 27 you add entries with Add People and Add Apps; on earlier versions you use Contacts and the allowed apps list.

• Phone
• Messages (including whatever your family actually uses)
• Maps
• Payments and transit
• Clock, for the alarm

Do this before you set any limit. In the reverse order, the first evening ends with you unable to open your alarm and switching the whole thing off. In a tracking survey of 10,000 people aged 18–69 in Japan (MMD Labo, July 2024), the app people most often named as one they overuse was LINE (47.3%) — also the app their family and employer reach them on. The apps you want to cap and the apps you cannot lose overlap more than you’d think.

If you keep tapping “Ignore Limit”

By default, Apple lets you dismiss a Screen Time limit when you hit it. That’s the design, not a bug. Two settings raise the cost of doing so:

1. Tap Screen Time > Manage Screen Time > Lock Screen Time Settings (on iOS 26 and earlier, scroll down to the passcode option) and set a four-digit passcode. You can also set up Screen Time Passcode Recovery so a forgotten passcode isn’t permanent
2. On iOS 26 and earlier, turn on Block During Downtime so restricted apps genuinely won’t open during the window — they go grey with an hourglass icon — instead of just showing a reminder you can walk past

There is evidence that a pause changes behaviour. In a six-week field study of 280 people (PNAS 2023, the one sec research), people closed the app in an average of 36% of the moments the intervention appeared, and by week six attempted to open the targeted apps 37% less often than in week one. What works is not a limit that cannot be broken — it is one that takes effort to undo.

A ten-minute checklist

• Turn on App & Website Activity
• Check last week’s top three apps
• Add phone, messages, maps, payments and clock to Always Allowed
• Cap those top three apps
• Schedule exactly one protected window
• Come back in a week and adjust the numbers

In a survey of 606 working adults in Japan (Job Research Institute, November 2024), 77.6% said they wanted to cut down. Far fewer have finished the setup. The step that decides whether yours survives the week is Always Allowed. If evenings are the problem, how to stop using your phone before bed picks up from here.

Sources

• Apple, “Set Screen Time Schedules and Time Allowances in Screen Time on iPhone” (iPhone User Guide, iOS 27, accessed 16 September 2026): https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/iphb0c7313c9/ios
• Apple, “Set up Screen Time for yourself on iPhone” (iPhone User Guide, iOS 27): https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/iphbfa595995/ios
• Apple, “Create, change, or remove a Screen Time passcode on iPhone” (iPhone User Guide, iOS 27): https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/iph272b4c4bd/ios
• MMD Labo, “2024 Tracking Survey on Smartphone Dependence” (10,000 people aged 18–69 in Japan, July 2024, Japanese): https://mmdlabo.jp/investigation/detail_2358.html
• Job Research Institute (Persol Career), “2024 Survey on Smartphone Dependence” (606 working adults in Japan, November 2024, Japanese): https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000227.000013597.html
• Grüning, D. J., Riedel, F., & Lorenz-Spreen, P. (2023). Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec. PNAS, 120(8): https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2213114120

This article describes iOS behaviour as of September 2026 and summarises published survey findings. Menu names and behaviour change with OS updates, and none of this is medical diagnosis or advice.