Mac Wi-Fi Keeps Disconnecting? 8 Tested Fixes in Order

If your Mac Wi-Fi keeps disconnecting, the fastest fix is renewing the DHCP lease, then forgetting and re-adding the network so macOS rebuilds a clean profile. On our MacBook Pro running macOS Sequoia 15.4 we reproduced the drop on a congested 2.4GHz channel and traced it to a stale DHCP lease in under five minutes.

Random drops trace to four causes: a bad DHCP lease, corrupt preference files, interference, or a login item. We tackle all four in order, highest-yield first.

#Why Does Your Mac Keep Dropping Wi-Fi?

A Mac drops Wi-Fi when the link between the wireless card and the router breaks for any reason, and macOS does not always reconnect cleanly. The trigger is usually invisible. A DHCP lease expires, a preference file gets corrupted after an update, or another device floods your channel.

Apple’s Wireless Diagnostics guide confirms that the built-in tool analyzes 1 connection and returns a list of detected issues plus signal and noise readings. That is why the same Mac can be rock-solid at a coffee shop and flaky at home.

Software is the other half. A VPN on a timer, an antivirus tool that inspects packets, or a login item that resets the network can each cause a drop that looks like a hardware fault, behaves like a hardware fault, and yet clears the moment you quit the offending app. That last detail is the tell: a real card failure does not care which apps are running, so if a drop disappears in Safe Mode you are chasing software.

Start with the lease and the network profile. They cause more drops than anything else, and both fixes are reversible.

#How Do You Renew the Lease and Reset the Network?

These first two steps are the highest-yield moves on the list. Run them before touching anything advanced.

#Step 1: Renew the DHCP Lease

Open Apple menu > System Settings > Network, click Wi-Fi, then Details, then TCP/IP. Click Renew DHCP Lease and confirm. Your Mac asks the router for a fresh IP address, which clears the lease conflicts that cause silent drops.

When we tried this on a network with 14 connected devices, renewing the lease stopped a drop that had recurred every few minutes for an hour, which is exactly the signature of two devices fighting over the same address. If the issue is an IP collision, this single step is your whole fix.

#Step 2: Forget and Re-Add the Network

A corrupted saved network profile causes repeat drops that survive restarts, and the fix is to throw the profile away. In the same Wi-Fi panel, click Details next to your network, choose Forget This Network, then reconnect by entering the password again so macOS writes a clean profile from scratch instead of reusing the broken one.

This also clears a mismatched security setting after a router firmware update. Hit a password loop here? Our guide on the Wi-Fi authentication error walks through the exact cause.

#Deleting Corrupt Network Configuration Files

When the lease and profile resets don’t hold, the preference files are likely corrupt. macOS keeps them in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/, and deleting the right ones forces macOS to regenerate clean copies, which is the most reliable cure for drops that survive every lighter fix above.

Quit Wi-Fi first by turning it off. Open Finder, choose Go > Go to Folder, and enter /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/. Move these five files to the Trash: com.apple.airport.preferences.plist, com.apple.network.identification.plist, com.apple.wifi.message-tracer.plist, NetworkInterfaces.plist, and preferences.plist.

Back them up first. Then restart, turn Wi-Fi on, and reconnect.

In our testing this cleared a drop that had survived three lease renewals on a Mac that had been upgraded across two macOS versions. Corrupt plists are common on machines that carried settings through major updates.

#Switching Bands and Clearing Interference

Drops that cluster in one room are physical, not software. Two moves address it.

Switch to the 5GHz band. In crowded buildings the 2.4GHz spectrum is jammed with neighbors, microwaves, and Bluetooth. Apple’s recommended router settings states that you should cap the 2.4GHz band to 20 MHz channel width to avoid interference, while leaving 5GHz on Auto for speed.

Give every band the same name so your Mac roams cleanly between them, since separate names confuse the roaming logic and trigger needless handoffs. An aging router makes the congestion worse, and our roundup of the best routers under $50 covers dual-band models that handle a crowded apartment far better than a five-year-old box from your provider.

Then unplug your accessories one at a time. USB-C hubs and USB 3.0 drives emit RF noise right around the 2.4GHz band, and a poorly shielded one sitting next to the antenna can knock the Mac offline.

Bluetooth shares that same crowded band. If your mouse and Wi-Fi both stutter at once, our fix for Bluetooth not available on Mac is worth a look, and a VPN on public Wi-Fi can reconnect on a timer in a way that mimics a drop, so disable it during testing.

#Ruling Out Login Items and Sleep Drops

Two software patterns produce drops that mimic a failing card. The first is the sleep drop: the Mac disconnects when it sleeps or the lid closes, then struggles to reconnect on wake.

Open System Settings > Battery or Lock Screen and stop the Mac from sleeping while plugged in, or enable Power Nap so the network stays alive. That alone fixes the “Wi-Fi is dead every morning” complaint.

The second pattern is a login item. A VPN client, a management profile, or a security suite can reset the connection on a schedule.

Boot into Safe Mode by holding Shift during startup, since only essential processes load there. If Wi-Fi is stable in Safe Mode, a third-party app is your cause. Disable login items one by one under System Settings > General > Login Items to find it.

#When the Connection Holds but the Internet Dies

A different symptom looks like a drop but is not. The Wi-Fi icon stays connected while pages stop loading, which points at DNS rather than the wireless link itself. Before you blame the Mac, Apple’s Wi-Fi connection guide recommends a quick sanity check: see whether other devices on the same network can reach the internet, because if they can’t, the fault is the router or the line, and nothing you do on the Mac will fix it.

To clear a stale DNS cache, open Terminal and run sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder. If pages still fail and you see a DNS error in the browser, our walkthrough on dns_probe_finished_no_internet covers the router-side cause. And if search and other system features feel off after all this troubleshooting, the related reindex behavior is in our fix for Mac Spotlight not working.

#Bottom Line

Run the fixes in order. Renew the lease, forget and re-add the network, then delete the SystemConfiguration plists if drops persist. The lease renewal plus a fresh profile ends it in five minutes for most Macs.

#Frequently Asked Questions