Two separate complaints about the Mac Weather menu bar item keep showing up after macOS updates, including on Golden Gate: the location shown is wrong, usually falling back to whatever location sits second in your list rather than where you actually are, and the temperature shown lags the Weather app's own widget by hours. Both have a known cause and a reliable fix, and they're not the same problem.

The two symptoms, and what causes each

  • Wrong location in the menu bar: the menu bar weather item doesn't use "current location" the way you'd expect. It displays whichever location sits at the top of your saved locations list inside the Weather app, which is not necessarily the one your Mac is physically closest to.
  • Stale temperature, especially after login or reboot: this points to the menu bar item's background access being interrupted. A reported interaction on recent macOS versions: unchecking the menu bar weather option can also quietly disable the Weather app's background access permission, and re-enabling background access is what actually restores both the widget and the menu bar together.

Fix 1: pin the right location

If the menu bar is consistently showing a city that isn't yours, this is almost always a location-list ordering issue, not a bug:

  1. Click the weather status in the menu bar.
  2. Choose Open Weather.
  3. In the Weather app's sidebar, find the location you actually want shown in the menu bar.
  4. Drag that location to the very top of the list. The menu bar always mirrors whichever location sits first, not necessarily "Current Location" even if that's also in the list.

If your actual current location isn't in the list at all, add it first through the search field in the Weather app, then drag it to the top.

Fix 2: fix the background-access and menu-bar link

If the location is right but the temperature is stuck or hours behind, or the menu bar periodically goes blank and needs you to manually reopen the Weather app to refresh it, this points to background access being disabled, sometimes as a side effect of the menu bar toggle itself:

  1. System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions, or System Settings > Control Center depending on your macOS version, and find Weather's background access setting.
  2. Turn background access off, then back on. Several people report this specifically "re-links" the menu bar item to live data, where simply leaving it on the whole time did not.
  3. Toggle the menu bar Weather control itself off and back on, in System Settings > Control Center > Menu Bar Only > Weather. Unchecking and rechecking this, rather than leaving it checked continuously, is what resolves it for some people after an update.

Fix 3: check Location Services

If "Current Location" never populates properly anywhere, including inside the Weather app itself, confirm Location Services is actually granted to Weather specifically, not just enabled system-wide:

  1. System Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services.
  2. Confirm the master Location Services switch is on.
  3. Scroll to Weather in the app list and confirm it's set to allow access, ideally "While Using the App" or better.

If Weather doesn't appear in that list at all, open the Weather app once first, since macOS only lists apps that have requested location access at least once.

Fix 4: if it resets after every reboot or logout

A location or background-access fix that works but doesn't survive a restart points to a deeper preference reset issue, separate from the settings themselves. As a last step, you can set a fixed, manually-typed location instead of relying on automatic current location, which sidesteps the whole dependency on location permissions re-triggering correctly after every login:

  1. Open the Weather app, search for and add your city manually by name rather than relying on "Current Location."
  2. Drag that manually-added location to the top of the list.

This trades automatic location updates (useful mainly if you travel) for a setting that reliably survives reboots, which is the more common need for a stationary Mac.

If you need something more reliable

If the built-in Weather menu bar item keeps drifting after every macOS update and you'd rather not re-troubleshoot it each time, several well-regarded third-party menu bar weather apps exist as alternatives, some bundled into broader system-monitoring menu bar tools. These generally handle their own location permissions independently of Apple's Weather app, which sidesteps this specific class of bug entirely, at the cost of a separate app to maintain.

The short version

  • Wrong location in the menu bar is a location-list ordering issue: drag the location you want to the top of the list inside the Weather app.
  • A stale or frozen temperature points to background access being interrupted; toggling it off and back on, along with the menu bar control itself, resolves it for most people.
  • Confirm Weather has Location Services access specifically, not just that the system toggle is on.
  • If it keeps resetting after every reboot, a manually pinned location is more reliable than depending on automatic current-location detection.