How to find the admin account on Windows 10
A Windows 10 system can set up multiple accounts; No matter how many accounts you set up, you will have at least one user account that is the Admin account. Normally, this is the very first account that is configured when a Windows 10 system is set up but it can be changed later, and any other account can be made the system admin.
If you have a few different accounts configured on your system, and you need to figure out which is the admin account, there are a few simple ways to find out.
Find the admin account
Check your own account
Before you check other accounts for admin rights, check your own.
- Sign into your Windows 10 system with your account.
- Open the Settings app.
- Go to Account.
- On the Your Info tab, check if it says ‘Administrator’ under your account name. If not, then there is another account on the system that is the admin account.
Check all accounts
If your account is not the admin account on a Windows 10 system, finding the admin account will take a little time but it is a fairly simple process.
- Open Command prompt. You do not need admin rights. Open it with normal user rights.
- Run the following command and it will list all the accounts, system created and user created.
wmic useraccount list full
- You now need to go through the results. Look for accounts that have an empty Description field, have both a FullName and Name field, and the Status field has ‘OK’. These may be several accounts. Take note of these accounts and their value in the ‘Name’ field.
- Run the following command in Command Prompt (no admin rights needed), and replace Name with the value for the account you found from the last account.
net user Name
Example
net user fatiw
- In the results that the command returns, look for the Local Group Membership field. If it says *Administrators, then the account has admin access on the system.
Need to delete a user? Here’s how.
Conclusion
There may be more than one admin account on a system so it can’t hurt to check all the listed accounts. If an account has been created on the system but it has never been used i.e., the initial account set up that happens when a user signs into their account hasn’t happened, that account will still be listed in the list of configured accounts. The list of accounts will list quite a few accounts created by the system. Disregard them all as they are high-level admin accounts that you cannot control unless you know the user-created admin account.
