Hide an account from the Windows sign-in screen

ByThe Tech

Works on Windows 10 and Windows 11

Occasionally you may want a user account to not display on the Windows 11 or 10 logon page.

The main use case for me has been setting up scanners that send directly to a PC share. In those cases I create a limited account with rights to just that share — but the account still appears on the sign-in screen for everyone to see. So annoying!

There are a few ways to deal with this:

  • Remove the account from the Users group (and Administrators, or any other interactive group)
  • Put the account in a group that only grants access to the share you need — the HomeUsers group works well for this if it’s available
  • Edit the registry

If you’ve got a user account you simply don’t want displayed — for example, a service account that only ever connects over the network — editing the registry is the cleanest answer.

Before you start

Editing the registry is powerful, and a mistake can cause problems. It’s a good habit to create a System Restore point first (Start → type Create a restore point → Create) so you can roll back if anything goes sideways.

Editing the registry to hide an account

  1. Open the Registry Editor.
    • Press Windows key + R to open the Run box.
    • Type regedit and click OK.
  2. Browse to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
  3. Right-click Winlogon, select New → Key, and name it SpecialAccounts.
  4. Right-click SpecialAccounts, select New → Key, and name it UserList.
  5. Inside UserList, right-click in the right pane and select New → DWORD (32-bit) Value.
  6. Name the DWORD exactly the same as the account you want to hide. (The name has to match the account name exactly, or it won’t work.)
  7. Leave the value data set to 0 to hide the account. (Set it to 1 — or just delete the DWORD — to show it again.)

Close the Registry Editor and the account will be hidden from the sign-in screen.

The fast way

If you’d rather not click through all those keys, you can do the whole thing with a single command. Open Command Prompt or PowerShell as Administrator and run (replacing AccountName with the account you want to hide):

reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList" /t REG_DWORD /f /d 0 /v AccountName

To unhide it later, change the /d 0 to /d 1, or delete the entry.

What “hidden” actually means

Hiding an account this way doesn’t disable or delete it — it only removes it’s tile from the sign-in screen. The account stays fully active. That’s exactly what you want for the scanner-to-share scenario: the account keeps working for network and share access without cluttering up the logon screen.

The one thing to be aware of: because the tile is gone, you can’t just click it to log in at the PC itself. If you ever need to log on locally with a hidden account, you’ll need the classic sign-in prompt where you type the username and password rather than picking a tile. Network connections, remote access (RDP), and share access all continue to work as normal.

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