How do I recover missing tags in iCloud Notes on iPhone?

I have phone 16 Pro Max. I planned on getting rid of my icloud membership so I thought I had to remove my notes from icloud and leave them under "On My iPhone". After I transferred them half of the tags were missing. I moved them back to icloud, now they're ALL missing. I recently started using ios 26 a few days prior to this problem. I have re-started the iphone multiple times in between all the transfers. I started at 8 mb memory before I moved the notes the first time, then "on my iphone" it had about 4.2, then when I moved it back to icloud where it was at 7.14 mb. About 30 min later it is the highest at 921mb and the amount of notes it has, has also changed. The hashtags are all written correctly as one word and appear gray, usually they are yellow. I don't use the Notes app on a computer.

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Original Title: iPhone

iPhone 16 Pro Max, iOS 26

Posted on Nov 30, 2025 1:50 PM

Top-ranking reply

azaksalmarzur28

Level 4

1,450 points

Posted on Nov 30, 2025 6:40 PM

Your tags disappeared because moving Notes between iCloud and “On My iPhone” breaks the tag index in iOS 26. To fix it, put all notes back in iCloud, turn off Notes/iCloud/Tags in Settings, restart, then turn them back on to force a tag re-index. Creating a new tagged note or duplicating a broken note forces the system to rebuild tags. Once iCloud finishes re-indexing, your yellow tags return.

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How do I recover missing tags in iCloud Notes on iPhone?

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