How to turn off natural scrolling on a Mac
Out of the box, a Mac scrolls the way a phone does: push your fingers up and the page moves up, as if you were dragging the paper. Apple calls this natural scrolling. If you've come from Windows, or you use a scroll wheel, you probably want the opposite — roll down, page moves down. This guide turns natural scrolling off in System Settings, which means macOS Ventura or later. The Variations section covers older versions, and what to do if you want the trackpad and the mouse to scroll in different directions.
What you'll need: A Mac running macOS Ventura (13) or later. If you have a trackpad and a mouse, you only need to change the setting once — it applies to both.
Open System Settings
Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the screen and choose System Settings.
Click Trackpad in the sidebar
Scroll down the list on the left and click Trackpad. It sits near the bottom, below Keyboard and Mouse.
Open the Scroll & Zoom tab
At the top of the Trackpad pane there are three tabs: Point & Click, Scroll & Zoom and More Gestures. Click Scroll & Zoom.
If you went to Mouse in the previous step, there are no tabs — the setting is on the main page.
Turn off Natural scrolling
The first item on the tab is Natural scrolling, with the description Content tracks finger movement. Click the switch so it turns grey.
There is no Save or Apply button. The change takes effect the moment the switch moves.
Check it in a window
Close System Settings and scroll in any window — a web page works well. Drag two fingers down the trackpad, or roll the mouse wheel towards you, and the page should move down. If it doesn't, go back and check the switch is off.
Variations
Click the Apple menu, choose System Preferences, then click Trackpad. On the Scroll & Zoom tab, untick Scroll direction: Natural. For a mouse, click Mouse instead and untick the same box. As on newer versions, one box controls both devices.
This is the common request from people who like the phone-style gesture on the trackpad but want a scroll wheel to behave like a scroll wheel. macOS has no setting for it: the trackpad and mouse switches are two views of one setting, and flipping either flips both.
The usual fix is a free app called Scroll Reverser, from pilotmoon.com. Leave natural scrolling turned on in System Settings, install Scroll Reverser, and in its menu bar icon turn on Reverse Mouse and turn off Reverse Trackpad. It needs permission under System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility the first time it runs, and it will ask for that itself.
If your mouse came with a companion app — Logi Options+ for Logitech, for instance — look for a scroll direction setting in there. It applies to that mouse only, which gives you the split behaviour above without a separate app. Check it isn't fighting the macOS setting: if both are set to reverse, they cancel out.
Troubleshooting
That is how macOS works — there is one scroll direction setting, shown in two places. To have the two devices scroll differently, see the Scroll Reverser variation above.
Something else is reversing it again. Check for mouse software in the menu bar (Logi Options+, Razer Synapse, Scroll Reverser or similar) and look at its own scroll direction setting. Two reversals cancel each other out, so turn one of them off.
System Settings only shows trackpad options when a trackpad is connected. On a Mac mini, Mac Studio or iMac with a mouse alone, use the Mouse pane — the Natural scrolling switch there is the same setting. If a Magic Trackpad should be connected and isn't, check it's switched on and paired under System Settings › Bluetooth.
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