iPhone Reminders Not Showing on the Lock Screen? 8 Fixes

If the reminder alert never appears

A reminder alert is an ordinary notification, so everything that can hide a notification can hide it. Go through these in order.

1. 1
   Allow Reminders on the Lock Screen

   Open Settings, tap Notifications, then Reminders. Allow Notifications has to be on, and under Alerts the Lock Screen option has to be ticked. It is possible to leave banners on and the Lock Screen off, which gives you alerts while you use the phone and nothing when it is locked.

2. 2
   Check the Focus you are in

   Do Not Disturb, Sleep, Work and every other Focus silence apps you have not allowed. Open Settings, tap Focus, tap the one that is on, then tap Apps and add Reminders. If the Reminders notification page offers Time Sensitive Notifications, turn that on as well, so a reminder due right now can come through.

3. 3
   Take Reminders out of the Scheduled Summary

   With a Scheduled Summary set up, the apps in it deliver their notifications in batches at the times you chose. In Settings, Notifications, Reminders, look under Notification Delivery and choose Immediate Delivery.

4. 4
   Give the reminder a time

   A reminder with no date never alerts. A reminder with a date and no time is an all-day reminder, and it alerts once, at the hour set in Settings, Apps, Reminders, Today Notification. If that switch is off, all-day reminders produce no alert at all. Add a time to anything you need at a certain hour.

5. 5
   Show the text of the alert

   If the alert arrives and only says that there is a notification, previews are hidden. In Settings, Notifications, Reminders, tap Show Previews and choose Always. With When Unlocked, the title appears only after Face ID has recognised you.

Apple lists every one of these switches in its guide to changing notification settings, and the Focus options in Set up a Focus. One more setting can shift alerts by hours: in Settings, Apps, Reminders there is a Time Zone option, and if it is fixed to a city you no longer live in, every reminder fires on that city’s clock.

If the Reminders widget is blank

A blank widget under the clock has three causes of its own, all of them outside the notification settings.

1. 1
   Allow widgets on a locked phone

   Open Settings, tap Face ID & Passcode, enter your passcode and scroll to Allow Access When Locked. Lock Screen Widgets has to be on. With it off, widgets stay hidden or empty while the phone is locked.

2. 2
   Check which list the widget shows

   Each Reminders widget shows one list. Touch and hold the Lock Screen, tap Customize, tap the Lock Screen, then tap the widget itself and look at List. An empty list gives an empty widget, however full your other lists are.

3. 3
   Check that the list still syncs

   For iCloud lists, open Settings, tap your name, tap iCloud, tap See All and make sure Reminders is on. For Exchange, Yahoo and other accounts, the switch is under Settings, Apps, Reminders, Reminders Accounts.

Reminders on the iPhone Lock Screen explains how to choose the list in more detail, and the Reminders widget guide covers what the widget can and cannot show. If it is the Calendar widget that has gone empty, the causes are different, and they are in calendar widget not showing events.

How to keep reminders on the Lock Screen with Calendarly

Even when every setting is right, an alert is on the screen for a moment and then joins the stack with everything else. The widget shows the top of one list. If you want today’s reminders readable every time you pick up the phone, put them in the wallpaper. A wallpaper is a picture, so no Focus, summary or notification setting can remove it.

1. 1
   Download Calendarly

   Get Calendarly from the App Store. It is free to download, runs on iOS 16.6 or later and has no account to create.

2. 2
   Allow access to Reminders

   The app asks when you first pick a layout that uses them. You then choose which lists appear, so a shared shopping list can stay out of sight.

3. 3
   Pick a Reminders layout in the Gallery

   The Gallery shows each layout on a real Lock Screen. Some are a plain list, and others place your reminders under the day’s events.

4. 4
   Adjust it in the Studio

   Change the background, the colours and the size. The preview redraws with your own reminders as you go.

5. 5
   Tap Use as Wallpaper

   The first time, Calendarly adds its shortcut, Update Calendarly Wallpaper, to the Shortcuts app and walks you through the one automation that runs it each morning.

The wallpaper is redrawn every morning with whatever is still open, and you can run the shortcut by hand when you want it to catch up sooner. It cannot interrupt you, though. A pill at eight or a call at four still needs a reminder with a time and working notifications, so the notification settings above are still worth getting right. The to-do list guide goes through the layouts, and calendar and reminders on one Lock Screen shows the ones that combine both.

Alerts, the widget and the wallpaper compared

The three ways of seeing a reminder on a locked iPhone do different jobs, and they can all be on at once.

Calendarly also has free widgets and Live Activities of its own, where a reminder can be ticked off and is marked complete in Apple’s Reminders. Your reminders are read and drawn on the iPhone and are not sent to a server.

If none of this helped

Open the Reminders app and find the reminder itself. It may already be marked complete, or it may sit in a list that belongs to an account you have signed out of. Then restart the iPhone, which often clears a widget that has stopped refreshing. Finally, check for an iOS update under Settings, General, Software Update. Apple’s page on Reminders settings lists the remaining options, including the default list that Siri saves new reminders to. That list is worth a look when a reminder you dictated seems to have vanished.