How To Find WiFi Password In Windows 11

Use Stronger Passwords is an extremely common piece of advice when it comes to securing your WiFi. And while this is indeed a good practice, one minor downside to long and complicated passwords is that they’re easy to forget.

If you manually save your passwords either in a notebook or digitally, that’s great. But even if you don’t, Windows saves the credentials for future use when you connect to a WiFi network.

The Control Panel method, which we’ve listed first, will be most intuitive for the majority of users. But the command line or powershell methods are way more efficient, and they’re actually quite simple to perform as well.

Via Control Panel

In case of active connections i.e., the WiFi your device is currently connected to, you can view the WiFi password from the Wireless Properties window. Here are the steps to do so on Windows 11:

1. Press Win + R, type ncpa.cpl , and press Enter.
2. Double-click the active WiFi connection.
3. Click on Wireless Properties and switch to the Security tab.
   
4. Enable the Show Characters option to view your WiFi password.
   

Using Command Prompt

If you’re trying to find the password for a WiFi network you’re not currently connected to, you can do so using the netsh command. Here are the steps to use this command on Windows 11:

1. Press Win + R, type cmd, and press CTRL + Shift + Enter.
2. Type netsh wlan show profiles and press Enter. Note the appropriate SSID from the list.
   
3. Replace SSID with the value from Step 2 and execute the following command:
   netsh wlan show profile name=SSID key=clear
   
4. Scroll down and check the Key Content (password) in the Security settings section.
   

Using Powershell

If you’d like to view all of the previously saved credentials at once, we recommend using the PowerShell method instead. Here are the necessary steps:

1. Press Win + X and select the Windows Terminal (Admin).
2. Powershell should open by default, but in case it doesn’t, press CTRL + Shift + 1 to launch a new Powershell tab.
3. Execute the following command:
   (netsh wlan show profiles) | Select-String "\:(.+)$" | %{$network=$_.Matches.Groups[1].Value.Trim(); $_} | %{(netsh wlan show profile name="$network" key=clear)} | Select-String "Key Content\W+\:(.+)$" | %{$password=$_.Matches.Groups[1].Value.Trim(); $_} | %{[PSCustomObject]@{ NETWORK_NAME=$network;PASSWORD=$password }} | Format-Table -AutoSize