Clipboard sync not working?

On Windows, the most common cause is not the one people expect: the “Sync across your devices” toggle does not appear at all until clipboard history itself is switched on. Turn on clipboard history first and the sync option stops being greyed out. If it is still greyed out after that, you are almost certainly signed in with a local or work account, or Group Policy has disabled it.

That covers most cases. The rest of this page works through each platform in the order worth trying, and is honest about the situations where there is no fix — on a managed work laptop, in particular, you often cannot change this at all, and no amount of clicking will help.

Windows 11 and 10: “Sync across your devices” is greyed out

Work through these in order. Each step is a genuinely different cause, and they are ordered by how often they turn out to be the problem.

1. Turn on clipboard history first. Go to Settings › System › Clipboard and enable Clipboard history at the top of the page. The sync toggle below it is inert until this is on — this is the single most common reason it looks greyed out, and most guides skip it because they assume you already did it.
2. Sign in with a Microsoft account. Clipboard sync runs through Microsoft's cloud, so a local Windows account cannot use it. Check Settings › Accounts. A local account is a hard blocker, not a bug.
3. Check whether the PC is managed. On a work or domain-joined machine, Group Policy can disable clipboard history and its sync outright, and that setting overrides the Settings app — the toggle will not respond no matter what you do. In mid-2026 a policy change disabled clipboard history on a wave of enterprise and some consumer machines, so this became much more common than it used to be. If this is your situation, nothing on this list will fix it.
4. Check the keyboard shortcut works at all. Press Windows+V. If no panel appears, clipboard history is off or blocked, and sync cannot work regardless.
5. Confirm both PCs use the same Microsoft account. Sync happens between machines on one account. Two accounts will never see each other's clipboard, and Windows gives no warning about it.

Copy and paste between iPhone and Mac not working

Apple's Universal Clipboard has five requirements and fails silently when any one of them is missing. All five must be true at once:

• Both devices signed into the same Apple Account
• Wi-Fi on for both — even when they are on different networks
• Bluetooth on for both; this is how they find each other
• Handoff enabled on both, in General settings
• The devices physically near each other, within Bluetooth range

Bluetooth is the one people miss, because copying text feels like it should travel over the network. It does not: proximity is part of the design. Universal Clipboard also has a short timeout — copy something, wait a few minutes, and it will no longer be there to paste.

Samsung and Android clipboard not syncing

Android has no system-wide clipboard sync between devices. What exists is vendor-specific and only works inside one ecosystem: Samsung's own sync moves the clipboard between Samsung devices signed into the same Samsung account, and Microsoft's Phone Link can move clipboard content between an Android phone and a Windows PC on supported handsets.

So if you are trying to copy from a Samsung phone to a non-Samsung tablet, or from an Android phone to a Mac, there is no built-in feature to fix. It does not exist to be turned on.

Chromebook clipboard not syncing

ChromeOS syncs the clipboard with an Android phone through Phone Hub, which requires both devices on the same Google account and Bluetooth on. Between a Chromebook and a Windows PC or Mac, there is no built-in route at all.

Why they all break the same way

Every built-in clipboard sync fails on the same three conditions, and once you see the pattern the troubleshooting stops being mysterious:

Three assumptions run through all of them: you own devices from one brand, you are signed into that brand's account on all of them, and often the devices are in the same room. Break any one — an Android phone and a work Windows laptop, a personal Mac and a managed PC, a machine where you cannot sign in — and the built-in feature has nothing to offer.

What to use when the built-in sync will not cooperate

A clipboard that lives in a web page sidesteps all three assumptions, because there is nothing to install and no account to be signed into. That is what RealtimeClipboard is: open the same page on both devices, type the same five-character key, and what you copy on one is ready to paste on the other.

• No account — so a local Windows account or a locked-down profile is irrelevant
• No install — so it works on a machine where you have no admin rights
• Any brand to any brand — Windows to Android, Mac to Windows, Chromebook to phone
• Any network — home Wi-Fi to mobile data; the devices do not need to be near each other
• End-to-end encrypted — text is encrypted in your browser before it is sent, and the server stores nothing

The honest caveats, since this page is about things not working: it is pre-alpha, the five-character key is a bearer credential so anyone who learns it can read that session, and a browser cannot read your clipboard in the background — you switch to the tab and it picks up what you copied. That last one is a browser security rule that applies to every web app, not a missing feature.

Open the clipboard