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Find a user's SID with WMIC or in the registry
By
Tim Fisher
Tim Fisher
Senior Vice President & Group General Manager, Tech & Sustainability
- Emporia State University
Tim Fisher has more than 30 years' of professional technology experience. He's been writing about tech for more than two decades and serves as the SVP and General Manager of Lifewire.
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Updated on January 15, 2022
Reviewed by
Ryan Perian
Reviewed byRyan Perian
- Western Governors University
Ryan Perian is a certified IT specialist who holds numerous IT certifications and has 12+ years' experience working in the IT industry support and management positions.
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Windows
- The Ultimate Laptop Buying Guide
What to Know
- In Command Prompt, type wmic useraccount get name,sid and press Enter.
- You can also determine a user's SID by looking through the ProfileImagePath valuesin each S-1-5-21 prefixed SID listed under:
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
A common reason why you might want to find the security identifier (SID) for a user's account in Windows is to determine which key under HKEY_USERS in the Windows Registry to look for user-specific registry data. Matching SIDs to usernames is easy with the wmic command—available from the Command Prompt in most versions of Windows.
How to Find a User's SID With WMIC
Follow these easy steps to display a table of usernames and their corresponding SIDs. It'll probably only take a minute, maybe less, to find a user's SID in Windows via WMIC:
See How to Find a User'sSID in the Registry further down the page for instructions on matching a username to an SID via information in the Windows Registry, an alternative method to using WMIC. The wmic command didn't exist before Windows XP, so you'll have to use the registry method in those older versions of Windows.
Open Terminal (Windows 11), or open Command Prompt in older Windows versions.
If you're using a keyboard and mouse in Windows 11/10/8, the fastest way is through the Power User Menu, accessible with theWIN+Xshortcut.
If you don't see Command Prompt there, type cmd into the search bar in the Start menu, and select Command Prompt when you see it.
You don't have to open an elevated Command Prompt for this to work. Some Windows commands require it, but in the WMIC command example below, you can open a regular, non-administrative Command Prompt.
Type the following command into Command Prompt exactly as it's shown here, including spaces or lack thereof:
wmicuseraccountgetname,sid
...and then press Enter.
See AlsoSecurity identifiersIf you know the username and would like to grab only that one user's SID, enter this command but replace USERwith the username (keep the quotes):
wmicuseraccountwherename="USER"getsid
If you get an error that the wmic command isn't recognized, change the working directory to beC:\Windows\System32\wbem\and try again. You can do that with the cd (change directory) command.
You should see a table displayed in Command Prompt. This is a list of each user account in Windows, listed by username, followed by the account's corresponding SID.
Now that you're confident a particular user name corresponds to a particular SID, you can make whatever changes you need to in the registry or do whatever else you needed this information for.
Finding the Username Using the SID
If you happen to have a case where you need to find the user name but all you have is the security identifier, you can "reverse" the command like this (just replace this SID with the one in question):
wmicuseraccountwheresid="S-1-5-21-992878714-4041223874-2616370337-1001"getname
...to get a result like this:
Name
jonfi
How to Finda User's SID in the Registry
You can also determine a user's SID by looking through the ProfileImagePath values in each S-1-5-21 prefixed SID listed under this key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
The ProfileImagePath value within each SID-named registry key lists the profile directory, which includes the username.
For example, the value under the S-1-5-21-992878714-4041223874-2616370337-1001 key on the computer you see above is C:\Users\jonfi, so we know that's the SID for that user.
This method of matching users to SIDs will only show those users who are logged in or have logged in and switched users. To continue to use the registry method for determining other user's SIDs, you'll need to log in as each user on the system and repeat these steps. This is a big drawback;assuming you're able, you're much better off using the wmic command method above.
FAQ
How do I find my own SID quickly?
Open the Command Prompt by pressing Windows key+R. Then, enter the following command and press Enter: whoami /user.
How do I add a user to my computer?
To create a new user account in Windows, go to Start > Settings > Accounts > Family & others users. Under Other users > Add other user, select Add account. Enter the user's information and follow the prompts.
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