Contacts not syncing on OS X Yosemite with iOS

This worked perfectly thank you!

This worked for me:

Refresh your contacts (on iPhone)

1. Open Contacts and tap Groups in the upper-left corner.
2. Pull down on the list to refresh the list of groups.

Hopefully this may help someone who comes here later. I had this same issue and tried all the things mentioned, but none seemed to work. I could build a contact on the MAC (OSX El Capitan 10.11.2) and instantly see it on my iPhone and iPad (both running iOS 9.2). However, contacts built on the iOS devices only shared across the iOS devices, not the MAC. After much digging in the Preferences on the MAC and Settings on the iOS devices, I found the issue.

The MAC was set to sync contacts using only my iCloud account. The two iOS devices were both set to use my iCloud account and my Outlook account. When I created a contact on an iOS device first, it was creating it in my Outlook account, not my iCloud account. Since the iOS devices had the Outlook account enabled for contacts, it shared across them. Since the MAC did not have the contacts enabled for Outlook, it never appeared. Creating on the MAC first always worked because it was iCloud and the iOS devices were also syncing there.

One solution could have been to enable contacts in my Outlook account on the MAC, but I chose the alternate path of disabling the Outlook contacts on the iOS devices so that I had one set, not two.

Before disabling the Outlook contacts, I made sure to copy any Outlook only contacts to iCloud so I didn't lose them. The process was easy. I filtered the contacts on my iPhone to show only the Outlook set. Since my MAC was already only showing only the iCloud set, I compared them. Any that I found on the iPhone which were not on the MAC, I clicked "Share Contact" > "AirDrop" on the iPhone and instantly got an alert on the MAC. Chose "Open" on the MAC for the AirDrop then selected "Import" for the contact prompt.

Once I had all the contacts in iCloud, I disabled contacts for Outlook on both iOS devices. Voila!

this definitely worked for me finally! thank you!

This was the one that worked for me. I had various email account contacts ticked as well as iCloud. unticked them and ticked iCloud.

Thank you!

Thank you! I had the same issue and this worked for me.