How to Find a User's Security Identifier (SID) in Windows

There are many reasons why you might want to find the security identifier (SID) for a particular user's account in Windows but in my corner of the world, the common reason for doing so is to determine which key under HKEY_USERS in the Windows Registry to look for user-specific registry data for.

Regardless of the reason for your need, matching SIDs to user names is really easy thanks to the wmic command, a command available from the Command Prompt in most versions of Windows.

Note: See How To Find User's SIDs 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.

Follow these easy steps to display a table of user names and their corresponding SIDs:

How to Find User's SIDs with WMIC

It'll probably only take a minute, maybe less, to find a user's SID in Windows via WMIC:

1. Open Command Prompt.
    
2. Once Command Prompt is open, type the following command exactly as shown here, including spaces or lack thereof:

   wmic useraccount get name,sid
   

   and then press Enter.
   
   Tip: If you know the username and would like to grab only that one user's SID, enter this command but replace USER with the username:

   wmic useraccount where name="USER" get sid

3. You should see a table, similar to the following, displayed in the Command Prompt window:

   Name            SID
   Administrator   S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-500
   Guest           S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-501
   HomeGroupUser$  S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-1002
   Tim             S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-1004
   UpdatusUser     S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-1007
   

   This is a list of each user account in Windows, listed by username, followed by the account's corresponding SID.
    

1. Now that you're confident that 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.

Tip: 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):

wmic useraccount where sid="S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-1004" get name

How to Find User SIDs 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 the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList key.

The ProfileImagePath value within each SID-named registry key lists the profile directory, which includes the username.

For example, the ProfileImagePath value under the S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-1004 key on my computer is C:\Users\Tim, so I know that the SID for the user "Tim" is "S-1-5-21-1180699209-877415012-3182924384-1004".

Note: 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 so, assuming you're able, you're much better off using the wmic command method above.