Premiere Pro captions not showing: six fixes

The captions exist on the timeline but the Program Monitor shows nothing. Or they show while you edit and are gone from the export. In both cases the cause is almost always a single hidden toggle. Work down this list; most people are done at fix 1 or 2.

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1. The CC toggle in the Program Monitor

The Program Monitor has its own caption display switch: the CC button under the preview (it lives in the wrench menu on older versions). When it's off, captions never render in the preview, whatever the timeline says. Click it, choose your caption track, and you're done. This is the most common cause by a wide margin.

2. Caption track visibility

Caption tracks have an output toggle like video tracks, in the track header on the left of the timeline. If it got bumped off, everything disappears. Also check that the track isn't collapsed so far that you can't see the caption blocks.

3. You have a transcript, not captions

Text in the Transcript tab of the Text panel does not mean captions exist. Transcript and captions are separate things. If the Captions tab is empty and there's no caption track on the timeline, you still need to click Create captions.

4. Captions missing from the export

If the preview is fine and the export is blank, open the Captions tab in the export dialog. If it says None, nothing goes out. Choose Burn captions into video for social, where the text becomes part of the image, or Create sidecar file for a separate .srt. This tab resets between exports more often than you'd expect.

5. Closed captions on a player that hides them

If the track format is CEA-608 or 708 closed captions, the text only shows when the player's CC feature is on. That is the format working as designed. For captions that are always visible on social, use the Subtitle format and burn them in.

6. Overlapping or zero-length captions

Imported .srt files sometimes carry overlapping timecodes or entries with no duration, and those render as flicker or as nothing at all. Scrub the caption track for suspiciously thin blocks, then retime or delete them.

Still nothing?

Restart Premiere with the caption track visible and CC switched on; the Program Monitor sometimes needs the nudge after toggling. And if captions show in the preview but not in your upload, go back to fix 4. Nine times out of ten the export tab had quietly reset to None.