Discord Custom Status: How to Set, Edit and Clear It on Desktop and Mobile

To set a custom status on Discord on desktop or in the browser, click your profile picture in the lower-left corner, choose Add Status, type up to 128 characters and pick an emoji. Then choose when it clears under Clear After and press Save. On the mobile app, tap your profile picture in the lower-right corner and choose Add Status. To change your online status instead (Online, Idle, Do Not Disturb or Invisible), click the same profile picture and pick one from the menu.

The 128-character limit and the five Clear After choices are not taken from a help page. We printed them from Discord's own web app code on 2 November 2026; the script and its output are below.

How to set a custom status on Discord (desktop and browser)

These steps come from Discord Support's Custom Status article and work the same in the desktop app and at discord.com in a browser:

• Click your profile icon in the lower-left corner, next to the mic and headset buttons. Your profile menu opens.
• Click the Add Status bubble at the top of the menu.
• Type your status. Click the emoji icon to add an emoji in front of it. With Nitro or Nitro Basic you can use custom emojis from your servers; to make your own, see how to make a custom emoji for Discord.
• Open Clear After and choose when the status disappears: Today, 4 hours, 1 hour, 30 minutes, or Don't clear. Today is first in the menu.
• Open Status if you also want to change your online status to Online, Idle, Do Not Disturb or Invisible.
• Press Save.

Your custom status now shows under your name in server member lists, in DMs and group chats, and on your profile.

How to set a custom status on Discord mobile

• Open the Discord app and tap your profile icon in the lower-right corner. You can also long-press it to open the profile menu.
• Tap Add Status, then Set a custom status.
• Type your status and tap the emoji icon to pick an emoji.
• Under Status Duration, choose when it clears.
• Tap Save in the upper-right corner.

Back on the You screen you can change your online status from the Online Status menu. The custom status is the same across devices, so a status set on your phone shows on desktop too.

How to edit or clear a custom status on Discord

On desktop or in the browser, click your profile icon and then your current custom status. Click the pencil icon to edit it, or the trash icon to clear it.

On mobile, tap your profile icon and then Edit Status. Tap the status text to change it, or the x next to it to clear it.

If you only want the status for a short time, set Clear After when you create it. Discord then removes it for you.

Discord custom status not showing

What you see	Cause	Fix
The status is gone the next day	Clear After was left on Today or a timer	Set Clear After to Don't clear
Friends see no status at all	You are set to Invisible, so you appear offline	Switch to Online, Idle or Do Not Disturb
People see your game as well	They opened your full profile	Normal: the custom status wins in member lists and DMs, and the profile shows both
An old status still shows	The app has not refreshed	Press Ctrl+R (Cmd+R on Mac) or restart Discord
A server emoji is missing	Custom server emojis need Nitro	Use a standard emoji

Discord's own note on this: custom statuses "override other activity statuses in a server's members list and friends list within direct messages (DMs) and group chats", but activity statuses "will still show when viewing a user's full profile". A new custom status can also send friends an "updated their status" push on mobile; see does Discord notify when you change your status.

What each coloured dot means next to your name is in what does idle mean on Discord. How Invisible differs from being offline is in Discord Invisible vs offline.

Custom status vs a "Playing" status

A custom status is text you type. The "Playing", "Listening to" or "Watching" line comes from activity status, which Discord fills in from the game or app you have open. The two are separate:

• • To hide the game line, open User Settings, then Activity Privacy, and turn off Share your detected activities with others.
• • To show any open program as "Playing", add it in User Settings, then Registered Games, with Add it!. You can rename the entry, which is how people make a custom "Playing" line.

If you only want a line of text under your name, the custom status is the simpler choice.

On a Steam Deck, Discord cannot detect games without a plugin. The setup is in Discord status on Steam Deck.

Discord custom status ideas to copy and paste

Short statuses read best in the member list, where long text is cut off. Copy a line, then paste it into Add Status as in the steps above. All 40 lines below are under the 128-character limit; the script at the end of this section checked them on October 6, 2026.

Aesthetic

⋆｡˚ ☁︎ ˚｡⋆ just vibing ⋆｡˚ ☾ ˚｡⋆
♡ soft hours only ♡
✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* do not perceive me *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧
˗ˏˋ ☕ ˎˊ˗ coffee first, questions later
🌙 ˚₊‧ night owl mode ‧₊˚ 🌙
₊˚⊹♡ in my own little world ♡⊹˚₊
🍓 ‧₊˚ sweet dreams, slow replies
☾ ⋆*･ﾟ:⋆*･ﾟ: lost in thought

The small symbols (⋆ ˚ ｡ ☾ ♡ ✧ ₊) are ordinary Unicode characters, so they show on Windows, macOS, iPhone and Android. Put the words in the middle so they survive when a member list cuts the status short.

Funny

🐢 replying at my own pace
🥔 currently a potato
🔋 social battery: 3%
🫠 melting, please hold
📵 touching grass, back soon
🍕 will trade replies for pizza
🧠 404: brain not found
😴 professional napper, amateur human

Gaming

🎮 grinding, do not disturb
🏆 one more game (it is never one more)
⚔️ in a raid, back in 40
🎧 queueing ranked, wish me luck
👾 afk, the boss won
🕹️ carrying the team (allegedly)
💀 hardstuck and happy
🛡️ duo? dm me

Kaomoji

(｡•́︿•̀｡) not today
(づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ free hugs
( ˘▽˘)っ♨ tea time
(ง •̀_•́)ง locked in
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ patch notes dropped
┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ) calm again
(っ˘ω˘ς ) sleepy
ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ just a lil guy

Kaomoji are faces built from characters, such as (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ for a table flip. They take more characters than an emoji, so keep the words after them short.

Templates to fill in

🎧 now playing: [song] by [artist]
📍 [city] ⋅ [time zone] ⋅ [pronouns]
💬 dms open for [topic]
🔨 building [project], day [n]
📚 studying [subject] until [time]
🎂 [age] today!
🌍 [language] / [language]
✨ [your motto here]

Replace the text in brackets. For a music status, write the song and the artist, not the lyrics: a full verse runs past 128 characters and is someone else's text. If you want Discord to show what you are listening to by itself, connect Spotify under User Settings, Connections.

For work chat, funny Slack status ideas has one-line statuses that also fit Discord.

Fancy fonts and boxes

Many copy-and-paste sites use "fancy fonts" such as 𝓈𝑜𝒻𝓉 or 𝕤𝕠𝕗𝕥. Those are letters from Unicode's mathematical blocks, so a screen reader may read them as math symbols, and Discord search will not match the plain word. Very rare symbols can also show as empty boxes on older phones. Emoji, the stars and hearts above, and kaomoji are safe.

Check a status before you paste it

This Python script reads one status per line from a text file and prints its length, whether it goes over 128 characters, and whether it uses fancy-font letters. It uses only the standard library:

import unicodedata
import sys

LIMIT = 128  # Discord custom status limit, in characters

path = sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) > 1 else "statuses.txt"
for s in open(path, encoding="utf-8").read().splitlines():
    if not s.strip():
        continue
    fancy = [c for c in s if unicodedata.name(c, "").startswith("MATHEMATICAL")]
    if len(s) > LIMIT:
        note = f"too long by {len(s) - LIMIT}"
    elif fancy:
        note = f"{len(fancy)} fancy-font letters, may be read aloud as math symbols"
    else:
        note = "ok"
    print(f"{len(s):>3}  {note}  |  {s}")

On a test file of four lines (Python 3.14, October 6, 2026) it printed:

 32  ok  |  ⋆｡˚ ☁︎ ˚｡⋆ just vibing ⋆｡˚ ☾ ˚｡⋆
 15  13 fancy-font letters, may be read aloud as math symbols  |  𝓈𝑜𝒻𝓉 𝒽𝑜𝓊𝓇𝓈 𝑜𝓃𝓁𝓎
 33  ok  |  🎧 now playing: [song] by [artist]
139  too long by 11  |  ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨

Python counts Unicode code points. An emoji built from several code points, such as a flag or a family, counts as more than one, so leave a few characters of room near the limit. Run on the 40 statuses above, every line printed ok.

What Discord's code says about custom status

Discord's help pages give the steps but not the exact limits, so we read them from the web app. This script downloads discord.com/app with no sign-in and searches its JavaScript for the custom status settings:

import re, urllib.request
UA = {"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh) Chrome/141"}
get = lambda u: urllib.request.urlopen(urllib.request.Request(u, headers=UA), timeout=90).read().decode("utf-8", "ignore")
html = get("https://discord.com/app")
print("build", re.search(r"BUILD_NUMBER\W+(\d+)", html).group(1))
js = "".join(get("https://discord.com" + s) for s in re.findall(r'src="(/assets/[^"]+\.js)"', html))
m = re.search(r"let (\w)=(\d+),(\w)=Object\.freeze\((\{MINUTES_30:[^}]*\})\);[^;]*;let \w=(\[[^\]]*\])", js)
print("max length:", m.group(2))
print("clear after values:", m.group(4))
print("menu order:", m.group(5))

On 2 November 2026 it printed:

build 657850
max length: 128
clear after values: {MINUTES_30:18e5,HOURS_1:36e5,HOURS_4:144e5,TODAY:"TODAY",DONT_CLEAR:"DONT_CLEAR"}
menu order: [l.TODAY,l.HOURS_4,l.HOURS_1,l.MINUTES_30,l.DONT_CLEAR]

So the limit is 128 characters, and the three timers are 1,800,000 ms (30 minutes), 3,600,000 ms (1 hour) and 14,400,000 ms (4 hours). Today and Don't clear are names in that code, not timers, and the menu lists Today first. Don't clear keeps the status until you remove it.

Discord custom status vs Slack status

Slack has the same feature with a few differences. A Slack status has an emoji, up to 100 characters, and a Duration menu that clears it (we checked both in our test workspace on 2 November 2026). Slack also shows a presence dot that turns grey after 10 minutes with no input on the computer, and a custom status does not change that. Steps are in how to change your status on Slack, and how the two apps compare overall is in Slack vs Discord.

FAQ

How long can a Discord custom status be?

Up to 128 characters. Member lists cut long statuses short, so keep the key words first.

Why does my Discord custom status disappear?

Clear After was set to Today or a timer. Edit the status and set Clear After to Don't clear to keep it.

Can people see my custom status if I am Invisible?

No. While you are Invisible you appear offline, and your custom status is hidden.

How do I clear my custom status on Discord mobile?

Tap your profile icon, then Edit Status, then the x next to your status.