How to Change Your Snapchat Username

You'd think that to simply change your Snapchat username, all you'd have to do was go into your settings and tap your username to edit it. You can certainly try this, but you'll quickly realize that it won't work.

Unfortunately, Snapchat doesn't allow users to change their usernames for security reasons, so the sad reality is that you're pretty much stuck with your current username as long as you want to keep your current account.

There is, however, a clever way to replace your username with a custom Display Name. Your username will remain the same, but it will hardly be visible to your friends.

Here's how to do it.

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Access Your Snapchat Settings

Open Snapchat and tap the little ghost icon in the top left corner of the screen to go to your profile.

Tap the gear icon in the top right corner to go to your settings.

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Add or Edit Your Display Name

The first two account settings you'll see will be Name followed by Username. Notice that if you tap your username, you won't be able to do anything with it except share it through a different app.

Tap Name. On the following tab, add or edit your First Name field and Last Name field. If you want, you can leave the Last Name field blank.

Tap the Save button that appears when you've made your changes.

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Check Out Your Profile to See Your New Display Name

As long as you have something saved in the Name fields as shown in the last step, it will appear in all your friends' chats and stories in place of your username.

The only time a friend might see your username is when they open a chat with you and tap the hamburger icon in the top left corner to pull up a small summary of your profile (which shows your snapcode, name, username, snap score, and chat emojis) or when they tap on your Display Name from My Friends on their profile.

Once you've saved your Display Name, you can use the back arrows in the top left of the screen to navigate back to your profile and see that your new name appears beneath your snapcode (above your username and snap score).

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Optional: Prepare to Manually Add All Your Friends to a Brand New Account

Although the Display Name does a great job at keeping your username hidden most of the time, it's understandable if your current username just doesn't work anymore and desperately needs to be changed—even if that means creating a new account.

The trouble with creating an entirely new account is that you want be able to transfer over your data from your old account—such as your current snapcode, your snap score, your snap streaks, your best friends, your conversations, any trophies you earned and all the friends that you added/added you.

If you're willing to give all of this up and manually add friends with your new account, then it might as well be worth it. After all, creating a new account doesn't mean you have to delete your old one right away.

On your current account, tap the ghost icon in the top left corner of the screen and then tap My Friends on your profile. To add all your friends over to your new account, you'll need their usernames, which means you'll need to look at each one of your friends' usernames individually.

You have two options for this, both of which could be pretty time consuming depending on how large your friend list is:

Tap each name individually, look directly beneath their Display Name and write down the username that appears beneath it.
Tap each name individually, then tap Share Username followed by Share URL to send the user's URL to yourself in any app of your choice.

Tap the back arrow to go back to your profile and then tap the gear icon in the top right corner. Scroll down, tap Log Out and confirm that you want to log out of your account.

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Optional: Create a New Account and Add Your Friends

Once signed out, you can tap the blue Sign Up button to create a new account with your new username. Once you've completed the account setup process for your new account, you can navigate to your profile by tapping the ghost icon and tapping Add Friends.

On the following tab, tap Username to search and add each individual friend by their username or tap the username URLs that you sent to yourself to automatically pull up those friends in Snapchat. Alternatively, if you know that many of your friends are already in your device's contact list, you can tap Contacts to sync the app with your contacts and quickly add them from there.