Categories are not showing up in magento home page

- Make sure you created categories under Default root category.
- Make sure all the categories are active. Inactive ones will be grayed-out. If a toplevel category is inactive the ones below do not show.
- Make sure your category products are,
- status - enabled
- visibility - catalog,search
- Stock Availability - In stock
- websites - your website
- categories - select your category

- Go to System > Manage Stores
- Click the “Main Website Store” link under Store Name
- Make sure the dropdown for “Root Category *” is set to you top level catergory.
- Now clear the cache.

Thats it. Now you can see categories in your homepage.