Changing the name of a user account on your Mac

Change User Account Name OS X

Every Mac has at least one user account on it, whether it’s your own or you’ve made another account for someone else to use.

At some point, you may feel the urge to change the name of one of your user accounts. It doesn’t matter if the account is an administrator or a regular user; we’ll show you the steps in this tutorial to change an account’s user name on your Mac.

Changing the name of a user account will not have any adverse effects on the account, and it won’t change what’s installed on the account or delete anything from the account. On the other hand, it will give you a new name to look at when you see a list of users or when you are on your Mac’s login screen.

How to change a Mac account’s user name

If you want to change the name of an account on your Mac, you can follow these simple steps:

1) Launch the System Preferences app on your Mac and open the Users & Groups preferences pane.

Change user name Mac - Users and Groups Mac System Preferences

2) Next, you’re going to click on the Lock button at the bottom of the preferences pane to unlock the settings.

Clock the Lock to Make Changes to User Accounts

3) When prompted, enter your admin password to authenticate your identity, then click the blue Unlock button:

Create admin account on Mac Unlock after entering password

4) Now you’re going to right-click on the account you want to modify from the side bar, and then click on the Advanced Options button:

iDB Account Advanced Options

5) Your next order of business is to change the Full Name field to what you want your new account name to be, then click the blue OK button to save it.

Change Account Name in OS X

Note: Take extra care only to change the Full Name field, and not the Account name field.

6) Next, click on the Lock button at the bottom of the window to prevent further changes and save your changes.

Click the Lock to Prevent Further Changes

And you’re done! Now when you attempt to log in as the user you changed the name of, your new account name should appear instead.

In our case, the account that was named iDownloadBlog is now named iDB, and that’s what we see on the login screen of our Mac now:

OS X iDB screenshot login

Wrapping up

You probably won’t change your account name very often, but if you have multiple users and you want to change a name to make two people with similar names easier to identify between, or you have gotten sick of seeing your old name, you can always use this method to refresh things and set up new user names.

Also read:

Have you ever wanted to change the user name of your Mac before? Share why or why not below.