How to Hide Active Status on Instagram, Turn off Active now on iPhone, Android in 2026

Open your DM inbox from the paper-plane icon and look at the rows. Anyone whose activity status is on shows a green dot beside their profile picture and the words Active now under their name; people who've been offline a while show a last-seen note like "Sent on Friday" instead.

That's exactly how your own row looks in everyone else's inbox right now. Checking here first gives you an obvious before-and-after: come back to this screen once you've flipped the setting, and your own dot will be gone from other people's view.

Tap your profile picture in the bottom-right corner, then the three-line menu at the top right, and choose Settings and privacy. The list is long and grouped under headings: How you use Instagram covers Saved, Archive, Your activity, Notifications and Time management; Who can see your content holds Account privacy, Close Friends, Crossposting, Blocked and Hide story and live; and below that, How others can interact with you begins with Messages and story replies. Activity status sits in that last group, not in Who can see your content, which is where most people look first and give up.

Instead of scrolling, use the search box at the top of Settings and privacy and type a few letters of "show"; Show activity status comes up as the first result. This shortcut is worth remembering generally: Instagram reorganizes this menu often enough that written directions go stale while the search stays reliable.

If you'd rather navigate manually, the setting sits inside Messages and story replies. Either way you land on the same screen.

The Show activity status screen has a single toggle with a line of explanatory text underneath. Blue means on, the default; tapping it turns it grey.

There's no Save button and no confirmation. The change applies immediately across your account, on every device you're logged into, and for everyone you've ever chatted with. Turning it back on later is the same tap, and Instagram doesn't tell anyone that you changed it either way.

Instagram enforces this trade-off symmetrically, and its own help documentation spells it out directly: once you turn off your activity status, you stop seeing when anyone you follow or message is active, was recently active, or is active in the same chat as you, and they lose the same view of you. There's no setting that hides your status while keeping visibility into everyone else's. If seeing when a particular person is online matters to you, weigh that against your own privacy, because you can't have both.

Turning off activity status covers the green dot and the Active now and recently-active labels. It doesn't make you invisible elsewhere: read receipts still show a Seen marker when you open someone's message, your name still appears in the viewer list of any story you watch, and your own story stays visible to whoever your account privacy allows.

For anything broader than the online indicator, look separately at Account privacy for who can follow you, Hide story and live for specific people, and Restrict or Block for individual accounts. Activity status is one narrow switch, not a privacy mode.