How to Remove Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU) and Office Background Agents on Mac

If you have ever installed Microsoft Office, OneDrive, or even a standalone Microsoft app like Teams on your Mac, you almost certainly picked up a silent passenger: Microsoft AutoUpdate (MAU). Many Mac users who want to remove Microsoft AutoUpdate on Mac are surprised to discover how many pieces it leaves behind — launch agents, helper apps, scheduled tasks, and gigabytes of cached update bundles — even long after they have deleted the Microsoft apps themselves. This guide walks through every file and folder involved, explains what each one does, and gives you precise terminal commands to remove them safely.

What Is Microsoft AutoUpdate and Why Does It Run in the Background?

Microsoft AutoUpdate is a background update manager that keeps Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote), Teams, OneDrive, and other Microsoft products current. It installs a set of launch agents that wake up periodically — even if no Microsoft app is open — to check for updates, download packages, and prompt you to install them.

On macOS Sequoia and the upcoming Tahoe release, these agents run as standard launchd jobs under your user account. They consume CPU cycles during their check-in windows and can hold hundreds of megabytes of downloaded update packages in cache folders. On Apple Silicon Macs the processes are native ARM binaries; on older Intel machines they are x86_64 executables, but the file paths are identical on both architectures.

Where Microsoft AutoUpdate Stores Its Files

MAU scatters files across several standard macOS Library locations. The table below maps each component to its path and gives a typical size range based on usage patterns in mid-2026:

The update package cache at ~/Library/Caches/com.microsoft.autoupdate2 is the largest offender. MAU downloads full installer deltas — sometimes several hundred megabytes each — and does not always clean them up after a successful update. If you have had Office installed for a year or more, this folder alone can exceed a gigabyte. For a broader look at what hidden processes are eating your storage, see what is taking up space on my Mac.

Before You Start: Should You Remove MAU Entirely?

Removing MAU is safe if you fall into one of these situations:

• You have uninstalled all Microsoft Office apps and no longer plan to use them.
• You use a managed corporate environment where your IT department handles Office updates via MDM or JAMF, making MAU redundant.
• You use Office 365 exclusively through the browser and have no locally installed Microsoft apps.
• You prefer to update apps manually through the Mac App Store versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (which use Apple's own update mechanism instead of MAU).

If you still use locally installed Microsoft Office apps and rely on automatic security patches, consider disabling only the most aggressive check-in schedule rather than a full removal.

How to Fully Remove Microsoft AutoUpdate: Step-by-Step

The following steps assume you are comfortable with Terminal. All commands require administrator privileges for the system-level items. Work through them in order.

1. Quit all running Microsoft processes

   Before deleting any files, force-quit every Microsoft process so nothing is holding file handles open:

   sudo pkill -x "Microsoft AutoUpdate"; pkill -x "Microsoft Update Assistant"; pkill -x "OneDrive"

2. Unload and remove the launch daemon (requires sudo)

   The helper daemon runs as root. Unload it before deleting the plist:

   sudo launchctl bootout system /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.microsoft.autoupdate.helper.plist
sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.microsoft.autoupdate.helper.plist

3. Unload and remove the per-user launch agent

   launchctl bootout gui/$(id -u) ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.update.agent.plist
rm ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.update.agent.plist

4. Remove the privileged helper tool

   sudo rm /Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.microsoft.autoupdate.helper

5. Delete the MAU application bundle

   sudo rm -rf "/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/Microsoft AutoUpdate.app"

   If the Microsoft folder under /Library/Application Support is now empty (i.e., all Office apps are gone), you can remove the whole folder:

   sudo rm -rf "/Library/Application Support/Microsoft"

6. Clear caches and preferences

   rm -rf ~/Library/Caches/com.microsoft.autoupdate2
rm -rf "~/Library/Application Support/com.microsoft.autoupdate2"
rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.autoupdate2.plist

7. Check for any remaining Microsoft launch agents

   Some Microsoft apps install their own agents independently of MAU. List everything Microsoft-branded in your launch agents folders:

   ls ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ | grep -i microsoft
ls /Library/LaunchAgents/ | grep -i microsoft
ls /Library/LaunchDaemons/ | grep -i microsoft

   Unload any remaining plists with launchctl bootout before deleting them, as shown in steps 2 and 3 above.

Removing OneDrive and Its File Provider Extension

OneDrive ships its own background agent separate from MAU. If you are removing all Microsoft components, you should also address:

• OneDrive app: Drag /Applications/OneDrive.app to Trash, or run sudo rm -rf /Applications/OneDrive.app.
• File provider data: ~/Library/CloudStorage/OneDrive-Personal — this folder mirrors your OneDrive files locally. Only delete it if you have confirmed those files exist in the cloud or elsewhere.
• OneDrive container: ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.OneDrive-mac and ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.OneDriveStandaloneSuite.
• OneDrive launch agent: ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.OneDriveStandaloneUpdater.plist.

For a deeper guide to completely removing apps and all their support files, see how to completely uninstall apps on Mac.

Disabling MAU Without Removing It

If you want to keep Office installed but stop MAU from running automatically, you can disable the launch agent without deleting it:

To disable the system daemon:

These commands mark the jobs as disabled in the launchd database. They will not start after a reboot even if the plist files remain on disk. You can still open Microsoft AutoUpdate manually from /Library/Application Support/Microsoft/MAU2.0/ to run a check when you choose to.

Alternatively, you can use the defaults command to set the update frequency to never check automatically:

Auditing All Remaining Microsoft Footprint

After following the steps above, it is worth doing a final scan to ensure nothing was missed. Run these searches in Terminal to surface any leftover Microsoft-related files:

• find ~/Library -iname "*microsoft*" -maxdepth 4 2>/dev/null
• find /Library -iname "*microsoft*" -maxdepth 4 2>/dev/null
• find ~/Library/Caches -iname "com.microsoft*" -maxdepth 2 2>/dev/null

These searches stop at four levels deep to keep them fast. Any hits you find can be evaluated individually and deleted if they are associated with apps you have already removed. A tool like Crumb can audit all of these locations at once and show you what is safe to delete before anything is removed, which is useful when you are not certain whether a given folder is still needed by an active app.

How Much Space Will You Recover?

The answer varies depending on how long Office was installed and how many apps were included. In practice, most Mac users recovering from a full Office suite removal report between 300 MB and 3 GB freed — the bulk of which comes from the update package cache at ~/Library/Caches/com.microsoft.autoupdate2, the app bundles themselves (each Microsoft app is 500 MB to 1.5 GB), and container data for apps like Outlook that store mail locally. Clearing the cache folder and uninstalling the apps themselves are both covered in the steps above.