Can you manage the settings for Automatically hide and show the menu bar in macOS? Yes, you can (at least as of macOS 15.5)!

Even though it’s not explicitly listed in Apple’s MDM protocol documentation, the management for hiding the menu bar is part of the .GlobalPreferences payload type.

The two settings you want to manage via your MDM-delivered configuration profile for .GlobalPreferences will be the <key> AppleMenuBarVisibleInFullscreen and the <key> _HIHideMenuBar with either <true/> or <false/>

Here are the different combinations for the four options:

• Always
  • AppleMenuBarVisibleInFullscreen: false
  • _HIHideMenuBar: true
• On Desktop Only
  • AppleMenuBarVisibleInFullscreen: true
  • _HIHideMenuBar: true
• In Full Screen Only
  • AppleMenuBarVisibleInFullscreen: false
  • _HIHideMenuBar: false
• Never
  • AppleMenuBarVisibleInFullscreen: true
  • _HIHideMenuBar: false

One odd bit of behavior I found is that even when it’s managed and unable to be changed, you can still click the drop-down menu in Control Center (the button isn’t grayed out), but even if you select a different option, the drop-down menu will still bounce back to whatever the MDM profile has set to be enforced.

If you don’t want to manage it via MDM but just want to script the setting, you can use something like

/usr/bin/defaults write .GlobalPreferences AppleMenuBarVisibleInFullscreen -bool FALSE
/usr/bin/defaults write .GlobalPreferences _HIHideMenuBar -bool TRUE

Just keep in mind that those settings may not actually take effect until you reboot (maybe logout, too—haven’t tested that).