GitHub notifications not showing on Windows: 7 fixes

Updated August 2026 · 6 min read

You know review requests are piling up, but nothing appears: no toast, no badge, no email. On Windows this usually comes down to one of seven causes. Work through them in order — the first four fix most cases.

1. Check the repository's Watch filter first

The single most common cause. Open each repository you expect notifications from, click the Watch dropdown, and check what it says. Participating and @mentions means you will hear nothing about new issues or PRs unless someone addresses you directly. Ignored means nothing at all — and GitHub keeps remembering that choice even after you come back and comment in the repo. Set it to All Activity for repos you genuinely need live updates from.

2. Audit your global notification settings

Go to github.com → Settings → Notifications. Two things matter here: under Subscriptions, make sure "Automatically watch repositories" is on if you expected every repo you contribute to be watched; and under Notifications you are participating in, confirm Email is ticked if email is one of your channels. If Web is your only channel and you do not have github.com open, notifications effectively do not exist for you.

3. Windows Focus Assist is eating your toasts

If a third-party app is delivering notifications but you see none: Settings → System → Focus assist (called Do not disturb on Windows 11) may be suppressing them, either permanently or during certain hours. Also check Settings → System → Notifications and make sure both master notifications and the specific app are enabled. Focus Assist's "After 11pm" rules are easy to forget you ever set.

4. A closed browser tab is not a notification system

If you rely on the github.com tab: it only shows anything while open, and Chrome/Edge will throttle background tabs aggressively. If the tab was closed or the machine slept through the event, there is no catch-up mechanism beyond the bell icon next time you visit. This is why most people eventually move to a tray-based client that polls independently of the browser.

5. Use a dedicated tray app

Gitify is free and open source: a system tray icon with an unread count that polls the GitHub notifications API about once a minute. It works well as a safety net. Trade-offs worth knowing: it is an Electron app (noticeable RAM), and its unread count resets when you view the list rather than when you handle each item.

6. Or script it yourself with native toasts

PowerShell + the BurntToast module gives you real Windows toast notifications from a polling loop:

# poll-github.ps1 — schedule via Task Scheduler every minute
$headers = @{ Authorization = "token ***" }
$r = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "https://api.github.com/notifications" -Headers $headers
if ($r.Count -gt 0) {
  New-BurntToastNotification -Text "GitHub", "$($r.Count) unread notifications"
}

Total control, but you own token handling, rate limits and error paths — and there is no clickable list of what arrived.

7. Still nothing? Check your token scopes

If you already run a tray app or script, verify the personal access token has the notifications scope (fine-grained tokens need "Notifications" read permission). A token that authenticates fine but returns an empty list with a 200 is almost always a missing scope. See our token scopes guide for the exact checkboxes.