How to change the clock on your iPhone Lock Screen

Which clock do you mean?

When people search for "change the clock face on iPhone", they usually mean one of three things:

• The Lock Screen time — the big digits above your wallpaper. You can change its font, weight, colour, numerals and, since iOS 26, its size. You cannot turn it into an analog clock.
• The Clock app icon — its hands move in real time, but the icon itself can't be restyled.
• A clock widget on the Home Screen — this is the one that can look like anything: analog, digital, flip, retro. Apple's own Clock app offers a couple of widgets, and apps like clockwidgets add whole galleries of faces. See our guide on adding a clock widget.

The rest of this page is about the first one — the Lock Screen clock.

Change the Lock Screen clock style (font, weight, colour)

1. Wake the iPhone and unlock it with Face ID, but stay on the Lock Screen — don't swipe up.
2. Press and hold the Lock Screen until the wallpaper gallery appears.
3. Tap Customize under the current wallpaper, then Lock Screen.
4. Tap the time. A panel opens with the font and colour options.
5. Pick a typeface from the row at the top and drag the weight slider to make the digits thinner or heavier.
6. Choose a colour swatch, or tap the colour wheel for any colour and adjust its intensity with the slider. Since iOS 26 the default is a Liquid Glass look that picks up the wallpaper; a solid colour still works if you prefer.
7. Tap the globe icon to switch numerals — Arabic, Arabic Indic, Devanagari and others.
8. Tap Done.

Each Lock Screen keeps its own clock style, so you can have a bold red clock on one wallpaper and a thin white one on another and switch between them by pressing and holding the Lock Screen.

Make the clock bigger or smaller (iOS 26 and later)

This arrived in iOS 26 and works the same way on iOS 27. On the Customize screen, tap the time and look for the handle at the corner of the digits. Drag it down to make the clock taller and larger — it can fill a good part of the screen — or drag it back up to shrink it. The wallpaper adapts: with a depth-effect photo, iOS keeps the subject in front and lets the time flow around it.

On iOS 18 and earlier there's no size control; the only way to change how much space the clock takes is to choose a heavier or lighter font.

Fix a photo that covers the clock

When the subject of your wallpaper — a face, a pet, a building — sits in front of the digits, that's the depth effect, and it's on purpose. Sometimes it looks great; sometimes it hides half the time. Two fixes:

• In Customize, tap the ⋯ button in the corner and turn off Depth Effect. The time goes back in front of the photo.
• Or keep the effect and pinch to zoom / drag the photo so the subject sits lower and only touches the bottom of the digits.

Depth effect also switches itself off if you add widgets under the clock, because there's no room for the overlap — so if it disappeared after you added a widget, that's why.

Keep the clock always visible

Always-On Display keeps a dimmed Lock Screen — clock included — on the screen at all times. It's a hardware feature of iPhone 14 Pro and later Pro models. Turn it on under Settings → Display & Brightness → Always On, where you can also choose whether the wallpaper and notifications stay visible or the display drops to a black background with just the time.

On every other iPhone the screen turns off when locked; raise the phone or tap the screen to see the clock. Low Power Mode disables Always On on the Pro models, and Sleep Focus dims the Lock Screen — both are worth checking if your clock seems dimmer than usual.

Why can't I move the clock?

The Lock Screen clock is fixed at the top. The resizing added in iOS 26 changes how far down the digits reach, but there's no way to put the time at the bottom, on the side, or in a corner. If you want a clock somewhere else on the phone — or a bigger one on a nightstand — use StandBy while charging, or a fullscreen clock app.

What the Lock Screen clock can't do

It's always a digital time in Apple's fonts. No analog hands, no seconds, no flip cards, no Nixie tubes. That's a limitation of the Lock Screen, not of your phone: the Home Screen has no such rule. A clock widget there can be any face at all, and a fullscreen clock app can take over the whole display.