Do you want to hide a user account on your macOS login screen? There are easy ways to do this, and you don't even need a third-party app to do so.

There are many reasons you would want to hide a user account. For example, you might want to keep an extra admin account, but you don't want others to know about it.

Regardless, here's how to keep an account hidden on the macOS login screen.

How to Hide All User Accounts on the macOS Login Screen

One of the options you have is to hide all of your user accounts on the login screen. If you use this method, macOS will only offer the username and password field on the login screen.

You won't see a list of users like you normally do. To get into an account, you will need to know your username and manually type it in.

Here's how you use this method if you're interested:

Hide all users on the macOS login screen
  1. Click the Apple logo in the top-left of your screen and select System Preferences.
  2. Select Users & Groups on the resulting screen.
  3. Click the padlock icon at the bottom, enter your login details, and hit Unlock. This lets you edit the options on your screen.
  4. Select Login Options in the left sidebar.
  5. For the Display login window as option, choose Name and password.

Your login screen won't display any user accounts from now onwards.

Related: How to Customize the Login Screen on Your Mac

How to Hide a Specific User Account on the macOS Login Screen

If you only want to hide a particular user account, you can use a command in the Terminal to do this. If you think this is handy, take a look at our cheatsheet of Mac Terminal commands.

You need to be logged into your Mac as an administrator to do this. Also, make sure you know the username of the account that you want to hide on your Mac.

Then, follow these steps:

Hide a user account on the macOS login screen
  1. Open the Terminal on your Mac.
  2. Type the following command and hit Enter. Make sure to replace username with the username of the account you want to hide.
            sudo dscl . create /Users/username IsHidden 1
        
  3. Terminal will ask you to enter a password. Type your password (not the account you're hiding, in case it's another account) and press Enter.

Your selected user account will no longer appear on the login window.

How to Hide the Home Folder for a macOS User

If you're hiding a user account for privacy reasons, you'll probably want to hide that user's home folder as well. This way, other users on your Mac won't know about that folder.

Here's how you do that:

Hide the home folder for a user in macOS
  1. Open the Terminal while being logged in as an admin on your Mac.
  2. Run the following command and press Enter. Make sure to replace username with the username of the user whose home folder you want to hide.
            sudo chflags hidden /Users/username
        
  3. Enter the password for your account and press the Enter key.

How to Unhide a User Account on the macOS Login Screen

If you no longer want to keep a user account hidden on the macOS login screen, you can remove that account from the hidden accounts list. macOS will then show that account on all your login windows.

Here's how to unhide a user account:

Unhide a user account on the macOS login screen
  1. Launch the Terminal on your Mac.
  2. Type the following command and press Enter. Replace username with the username of the account you want to unhide.
            sudo dscl . create /Users/hiddenuser IsHidden 0
        
  3. Type your account password and hit Enter.

How to Retrieve Your User Accounts List

What if you forgot the username of the account that you've hidden on the login screen? How do you get access to that account now that you don't know what to type in the username field?

Luckily, macOS lets you view a list of all your users from any account on your Mac computer. You can use this option to find the account that you want to gain access to.

Here's how to view the user list in macOS:

  1. Access the Terminal.
  2. Type the following and hit Enter.
            ls /users
        
  3. You'll see a full list of all your user accounts. This includes your hidden accounts as well.

Hiding User Accounts on the macOS Login Screen

Not everyone needs to know what user accounts you have on your Mac. Using the methods above, you can hide all or particular accounts from being shown on your Mac's login screen.

macOS offers many security and privacy features, and these let you hide virtually everything on your Mac.