Well I finally found the answer. Under the bindings of the search field predicate you see the place to enter the key path you wish to use to compare to the value that is entered in the search field. The entry looks like this keyPath contains $value To activate the binding you replace keyPath with the name of the core data property you wish compared to the value entered in the search field. The contains search that is done is case sensitive. To make the search case insensitive put [cd] directly after the word contains. keyPath contains[cd] $value Search is now case insensitive.