How to Rename User Profile Folder in Windows 10/11

This article explains in detail how to change the name of your user profile folder in Windows.

In some cases, it’s necessary to manually rename the user profile folder because Windows truncates the user profile folder name to a certain number of characters when creating the user account. For instance, when you create a user account connected to a Microsoft account in Windows 10, the first 5 characters of your live account ID will be used for your user profile folder name. For instance, if sramesh_2001[@outlook.com] is your Microsoft account ID, the user profile folder would be named “srame“.

This issue doesn’t occur if you create a local user account first and then switch to Microsoft account. If you’d like to have a custom name for your user account folder, create a local account with your preferred name. Once you log in and your profile is initialized, you may switch to Microsoft Account (MSA). The user account folder will retain the same name.

Likewise, on some systems, the user profile folder may have the full name with space in between (“Users\John Smith” instead of “Users\JohnSmith“), and may you want to remove the space. If you have an existing user account with the profile folder name truncated to five characters or it contains a space, this article tells you how to rename the user profile folder as desired.

Before proceeding, it’s advisable to take a complete image of your Operating System drive, as a safety precaution.

Note: Until you complete the entire procedure till Step 6, do not log in to the primary account (whose profile folder you want to rename). Except “Step 1”, every operation has to be carried out from a secondary admin account only. If you’ve configured Windows to automatically log in to your primary account, disable auto-login before proceeding.

Rename User Profile Folder in Windows 10/11

To rename your user profile folder in Windows, follow these steps:

Step 1: Stop OneDrive Sync/Backup of your Personal Folders

If you’re using OneDrive, open OneDrive Settings and click the Manage Backup button. Turn off backup/synchronization of your personal folders: Desktop, Documents, and Pictures. For more information, check out this article.

In the OneDrive settings, go to the Account tab, and select Unlink this PC.

After you complete all the steps in this article, you can re-link and re-enable OneDrive backup if you want.

Similarly, if you’re using any other sync client (e.g., Google Drive, DropBox, etc.), turn off the synchronization of your shell folders in the respective app. You can turn on sync later.

Step 2: Rename the User Profile Folder

1. Create a second administrator account, which can be a local user account.
2. Log off from your primary account, and log in to the secondary admin account.
3. Start regedit.exe and navigate to:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

4. Each subkey represents the SID of user accounts, including the built-in accounts in the system. Select the SID of your primary account for which you want to rename the profile folder. You can identify it by looking at the ProfileImagePath value in the right pane.
   

   To get the SID of all the user accounts on the computer, run this command: wmic useraccount list full. Here’s a sample output.

   

   Alternately, you can find the SID of the user account (which is currently logged in) by running the command “whoami /user“. So, to get the SID of the primary user account (whose profile folder you want to rename), run the whoami command from that user account.

5. In the appropriate subkey, update the ProfileImagePath value data accordingly, from the old user account to the new:

   Example:
   
   C:\Users\srame
   
   to
   
   C:\Users\Ramesh

6. Exit the Registry Editor.
7. Restart Windows. This is to avoid “File In Use” error when renaming the profile folder
8. Log back in (again to the second administrator account.)
9. Launch File Explorer and rename the profile folder. The folder name should exactly be the same as you typed in step 6 above.
   
   If you still receive the “File In Use” error when renaming the profile folder, boot into the Windows Recovery Environment and rename the folder via the Command Prompt. For more information, see the section “Accessing the Recovery Environment” in this article.

This renames your user profile folder.

Step 3: Reset and Rebuild Windows Search Index

The Windows Search index would still have thousands of entries pointing to the old profile folder path. You’ll need to reset and rebuild the Search Index completely by setting the SetupCompletedSuccessfully registry value to 0.

1. Start the Registry Editor regedit.exe and go to:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Search

2. Change the registry value SetupCompletedSuccessfully data from 1 to 0
   
   The above registry change SetupCompletedSuccessfully = 0 causes Windows Search to clear custom indexed locations, add default locations, and rebuild the index from scratch.
3. Exit the Registry Editor.
4. Open the Services MMC (services.msc)
5. Restart the Windows Search service.
   

Full instructions are available in the article Reset and Rebuild Search Index Completely in Windows. Especially see section How to Manually Reset Windows Search and Rebuild the Index in that article.

Resetting search will clear all indexed locations, and Windows Search starts rebuilding the index automatically. If you have any custom folder locations to add to the index, add it manually by launching Control Panel → Indexing Options.

Step 4: Update the Registry Paths (system-wide)

Although you’ll be able to log in to the profile and use it, just renaming the ProfileImagePath value is not enough. There could be hundreds of registry values pointing to the old user profile folder, and the numbers can vary depending upon the programs installed on the system.

For example, the Cortana search stores the index database location in the registry, and failing to update the path breaks the search feature in the Start menu and the Settings app.

You need a decent registry search and replace tool to bulk find and replace every occurrence of the string “Users\oldname” to “Users\newname“.

You may try the freeware Registry Finder by Sergey Filippov to find and replace the registry values en masse. Register Finder can replace REG_BINARY and REG_MULTI_SZ values as well. For support, visit the Registry Finder forum.

“With the Replace feature (in Registry Finder) you can easily replace all or particular occurrences of one string with another. The replacement is performed only in items that are in the Find Results window. In the Replace dialog, you specify either all items or just selected ones. After the replacement is done, items in the window are updated. If some item does not match the search criteria any more it still remains in the list.”

1. In the Registry Finder window, use the Find option to find the string C:\Users\srame
   
2. From the Find Results window, click on the Edit menu, click Replace in Find Results…
3. Replace all instances of the old profile name with the new one.
   
   Rename #1:

   C:\Users\srame
   
   to
   
   C:\Users\Ramesh
   
   

4. Similarly, use the Find option to find the string C:\\Users\\srame
5. Replace all instances of the old profile name with the new one.
   Rename #2:

   C:\\Users\\srame
   
   to
   
   C:\\Users\\Ramesh
   

   Note: Office 365 and other apps store the path in the above format (double backslashes.) in some areas of the registry.

Step 5: Update the per-user Registry Paths (NTUSER.DAT & USRCLASS.DAT)

The NTUSER.DAT and USRCLASS.DAT are per-user registry hives that are separate for each user account. In the previous section, as you were using Registry Finder from the 2nd administrator account, NTUSER.DAT and USRCLASS.DAT of the original account are not updated.

So, you’ll have to load the NTUSER.DAT and USRCLASS.DAT file of the original user account in Registry Finder, find and replace the user profile path accordingly.

Note that the two files are hidden and protected by default. To view them, you need to enable “Show all files…” and disable “Hide protected operating system files..” in Folder Options.

1. In the Registry Finder window, click the File menu, and select Load Hive…
2. Browse to select the NTUSER.DAT of your user account — e.g., C:\Users\srame\NTUSER.DAT.
3. Assign a name for the loaded hive — e.g., myhive

4. Select one of the options for the Parent key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_USERS
5. Click OK. The hive will be loaded under one of the parent keys above.
6. With the MyHive registry branch selected, use the Find option to find the string C:\Users\srame

   You’ll be surprised to see many entries (especially, OneDrive settings) still pointing to the old user profile folder.
7. Replace all the entries with the new profile folder name — e.g., C:\Users\Ramesh
   
   Rename #1:

   C:\Users\srame
   
   to
   
   C:\Users\Ramesh
   

8. With the MyHive registry branch selected, use the Find option to find the string C:\\Users\\srame
9. Replace all the entries with the new profile folder name — e.g., C:\\Users\\Ramesh
   Rename #2:

   C:\\Users\\srame
   
   to
   
   C:\\Users\\Ramesh
   

   Note: Office 365 and other apps store the path in the above format (double backslashes.) in some areas of the registry.

10. Once the registry values are updated, switch to the “Local Registry” tab from the “Find the Results” tab.
11. In the “Local Registry” tab, select the MyHive key
12. From the File menu, click Unload Hive… and unload MyHive. This is important!
    
    Note that the Unload Hive… option will be grayed out if you’re in the Find Results tab or if you haven’t selected “MyHive“.
13. Repeat the steps 1-12, but this time, you need to load the usrClass.dat hive located here:

    C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\usrClass.dat

14. Once the registry values are updated, unload the hive via the File menu. This is important!
15. Close Registry Finder and restart Windows.

Log in to your primary account and see if everything works correctly. Reconfigure OneDrive now, if required.

Step 6: Update the INI files

This step may be needed if some legacy software on your computer is storing files in text files (e.g. –  .ini files), and those entries are pointing to the old profile folder.

You may download Everything search tool from voidtools.com and do a content search within text-based files — especially .ini.

Update the text-based files to reflect the new path.

Information in this article applies to all versions of Windows, including Windows 11.