The native route on macOS 26
1. Press ⌘Space to open Spotlight.
2. Press ⌘4 to switch to the clipboard list.
3. Type a word to filter, arrow to the item you want, press Enter.
Retention is 8 hours by default. The Clipboard switch lives in System Settings, then Spotlight, and the choices are 30 minutes, 8 hours or 7 days. If ⌘4 opens an empty panel and you know you copied something a minute ago, the switch is almost certainly off. Turn it on and it starts recording from that moment.
It survives a reboot. So this is real storage on disk, not a list held in memory until you log out. Apple's own note in that panel warns that sensitive text can end up in it, which is fair and true of every clipboard history including mine.
Before macOS 26 there is nothing
Sonoma and Sequoia keep one item. In Finder you can open Edit, then Show Clipboard, and you will see exactly that: the single thing you copied last. There is no list to page back through, and there is no macOS 25.
The list an app keeps is a different kind of record. It is on disk, it has no expiry unless you set one, and it holds the type of each item, so an image stays an image and a colour stays a colour.
Search is where the gap shows. Spotlight's clipboard panel filters what is in its own window. A local database can be searched by source app and date range, and words recognised inside a copied screenshot become ordinary search terms.
The trap
Plain text only. The Tahoe history does not keep copied images, and it does not read text inside them. Copy a screenshot, and there is nothing in ⌘4 to go back to.
The window closes quietly. Nothing tells you an item expired. You go looking for a link from this morning, the list starts at lunchtime, and that is the whole answer. Set the retention to 7 days on day one if you plan to rely on it.
It is per-Mac. Copies do not travel to your other Mac or your iPhone.
What I use
If you want free clipboard history and nothing else, install Maccy. It is open source, MIT, about 1.6 MB, and it caps at 999 items with a default of 200. I used it for years and still recommend it without hesitation.
I copy and paste a couple of hundred times a day, and I kept wanting more than a list, so I built Klipto on Maccy's open-source core and took it further. History is unlimited with no expiry by default, hold ⌥⌘V to step through it and release to paste, and the same popup can strip formatting or convert a HEX value on the way out. It needs macOS 14 Sonoma or later.