How do I remove the Social tab in Gmail?

Last reviewed: September 23, 2026 · Markdown version

Turn the tab off and its mail shows up in Primary instead — hiding a tab is a display choice, not a deletion. Google defines the Primary tab as "Emails from people you know and messages that don't appear in other tabs", so once Social is not shown, that mail has nowhere else to appear (Organize your emails into categories, read 23 September 2026). The switches are in different places on each device:

On a computer: click Settings; in Quick settings, under "Inbox type", select Default, click Customize, choose which of Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums to keep, then Save.
iPhone and iPad: in the Gmail app, Menu → Settings → your account → Inbox customizations → Inbox categories, then "Turn a category on or off" (Organize your emails into categories (iPhone & iPad), read 23 September 2026).
Android: Menu → Settings → your account → Inbox type Default Inbox → Inbox categories, then "Check or uncheck a category" (Organize your emails into categories (Android), read 23 September 2026).

To get rid of every tab at once rather than just Social, Google's advice is short: "To turn off categories, change your inbox type." One limit applies in the other direction: "If you have more than 250,000 emails in your inbox, you can't use the 'Default' inbox type."

What actually happens when you untick one

The tab stops being shown and that mail arrives in Primary. Whether Gmail keeps classifying the hidden category is not something Google spells out: its search help documents category:social only "If you use inbox categories" (Refine searches in Gmail, read 23 September 2026), and does not say whether that search still works for a tab you have hidden. What is certain is the trade: turning tabs off makes your inbox busier, not tidier — one stream you must triage yourself, versus several streams that hide things from you.

Which way is right depends on one question

Do you read the mail in that tab? If you genuinely never open Social, the tab is doing its job and removing it is a downgrade.
Do you miss things because of it? Two fixes short of removing the tab. Move a misfiled message to the right tab — Google says that over time "this helps Gmail learn your preferences and sort your email more accurately". Or write a filter for that sender; Google lists filters that direct a sender's "email to a specific category" as an option. For anything more, turn the tabs off and use filters and labels instead — those you control, the classifier you do not.

The tab is not the problem, usually

A Social tab with 4,000 unread notifications is not a tab problem. It is 4,000 notifications nobody asked for, hidden well enough that nobody dealt with them — and they still count against your storage while they sit there, because Google counts "Gmail messages and attachments" toward the quota (How your Google storage works, read 23 September 2026). Hiding and reducing are different operations, and only one of them makes tomorrow lighter. The same is true of Promotions.