Slack Status Change Notification: The Events an App Gets, Timed

Slack does not notify anyone when you change your status. Nobody gets an alert, and there is no setting to follow another person's status. An app can find out, though: Slack sends it a user_status_changed event and a user_change event, and in our tests both arrived less than a second after the change. We measured this on 4 October 2026 with a test app in a free-plan workspace. The app listened over Socket Mode, subscribed to both events with the users:read scope, and we changed our own status with users.profile.set.

What each status change sent

Each row is one users.profile.set call. The times run from the moment we sent the call to the moment the event reached our app:

Three things in that table matter for an app:

• • user_status_changed fires only when the status itself changes. Sending the same status again fired only user_change.
• • user_change fires for any profile write, even one that changes nothing you can see. If you subscribe to user_change alone, you get many events that are not status changes.
• • The two events do not arrive in a fixed order. Across the 8 status changes we logged, including the expiry runs below, user_change came first 3 times.

The text-only status came back with "status_emoji": ":speech_balloon:" in the event. Slack fills in the speech balloon when a status has text and no emoji, so do not treat that emoji as one the person chose.

What the event contains

Both events carry the whole user object, not a diff. This is the event part of our text-only change, cut down to the status fields:

{
  "type": "user_status_changed",
  "user": {
    "id": "U0B7L4YK420",
    "name": "sieun",
    "tz": "Asia/Seoul",
    "profile": {
      "status_text": "sglab test 2 text only",
      "status_emoji": ":speech_balloon:",
      "status_expiration": 0,
      "status_clear_on_focus_end": false,
      "huddle_state": "default_unset"
    },
    "updated": 1791076558
  },
  "cache_ts": 1791076558,
  "event_ts": "1791076558.049800"
}

There is no "previous status" field. To say "Ana changed her status from Lunch to In a meeting", your app has to store the last status it saw for each user and compare.

Expiring statuses send events too

We set a status to expire in 90 seconds, then in a second run in 180 seconds, and checked users.profile.get every 5 to 10 seconds while the app listened:

So an expiry is a normal status change for an app: both events fire, with an empty status_text. Slack cleared both statuses before the time we set, which matches what we saw on longer durations when we tested why Slack keeps clearing a status.

The listener we ran

This is the core of our test app, a Python Socket Mode client with slack_sdk. It needs an app-level token with connections:write and a bot token with users:read. The manifest subscribes the bot to user_change and user_status_changed:

import json, os, time
from slack_sdk.socket_mode import SocketModeClient
from slack_sdk.socket_mode.response import SocketModeResponse
from slack_sdk.web import WebClient

def handler(client, req):
    client.send_socket_mode_response(SocketModeResponse(envelope_id=req.envelope_id))
    if req.type != "events_api":
        return
    event = req.payload["event"]
    if event["type"] == "user_status_changed":
        p = event["user"]["profile"]
        print(time.time(), event["user"]["id"], p["status_emoji"], p["status_text"],
              p["status_expiration"])

client = SocketModeClient(app_token=os.environ["SLACK_APP_TOKEN"],
                          web_client=WebClient(token=os.environ["SLACK_BOT_TOKEN"]))
client.socket_mode_request_listeners.append(handler)
client.connect()
while True:
    time.sleep(5)

The setup steps for a Socket Mode app and its token errors are on our Socket Mode in Python page. Setting a status from code is on set a Slack status with the API.

Polling instead of events

Without an event subscription, you can poll users.profile.get for each person. During our expiry runs we polled every 5 to 10 seconds, and the poll first showed the empty status 4 and 7 seconds after the event, which was simply the wait for the next poll. Polling once a minute would catch a change up to a minute late, and it costs one call per person per minute, while the event costs nothing per person. Use polling only when you cannot install an app with events.

If what you want is a ping when a coworker comes online rather than when their status text changes, that is a presence question with different API calls. We covered it on get notified when someone comes online.