How to View Saved Wi-Fi Passwords in Windows Settings

Why You'd Need to Recover a Saved Wi-Fi Password

Windows remembers the password for every Wi-Fi network you've ever connected to and reconnects automatically without ever showing you the key again. That's convenient until you need to give the password to a new device, a guest, or a smart home gadget that only accepts manual entry — and you've long since forgotten it yourself. Rather than resetting your router, you can pull the saved key straight out of Windows in under a minute, either through the network adapter's properties dialog or with the netsh command line tool.

Method 1: Wireless Properties Dialog (GUI)

This works for the network you're currently connected to, or any network Windows still has a saved profile for.

1. Right-click the network icon in the system tray and choose Network & Internet settings, or go to Settings → Network & Internet → Wi-Fi → Manage known networks.
2. Windows Settings only shows the network name and won't reveal the password directly, so open the legacy Control Panel applet instead: press Win + R, type ncpa.cpl, and press Enter to open Network Connections.
3. Double-click your Wi-Fi adapter, then click Wireless Properties in the status window that appears.
4. Switch to the Security tab.
5. Check the Show characters box under the Network security key field. The plaintext password appears immediately.

This only works for the network you're actively connected to at the time, since Windows populates the dialog from the live adapter state.

Method 2: netsh (Works for Any Saved Network)

The netsh approach is more powerful because it can pull the key for any network profile Windows has stored, not just the one you're on right now, and it's scriptable if you ever need to export several at once.

Open Command Prompt (it doesn't need to be elevated for this) and list every saved profile:

netsh wlan show profiles

This prints every SSID Windows has ever saved a credential for. Pick the one you want and run:

netsh wlan show profile name="Home-Network" key=clear

Replace Home-Network with the exact SSID from the previous list (quotes are required if the name has spaces). Scroll down to the Security settings section and look for the Key Content field — that's your plaintext password.

for /f "tokens=3 delims=:" %i in ('netsh wlan show profiles ^| findstr /c:"All User Profile"') do @netsh wlan show profile name="%i" key=clear | findstr "Key Content" && echo %i

Security Considerations

The fact that any local user account can extract every Wi-Fi password on a machine with two commands is worth keeping in mind. If you're setting up a shared or public computer, don't assume your Wi-Fi password stays private just because you didn't write it on a sticky note — anyone with a Command Prompt and a saved profile can read it back out. If you suspect a network's password has been exposed this way, the only real fix is to rotate the password on the router itself and reconnect your trusted devices.

Wrap-Up

The GUI method is fine for a quick one-off lookup of the network you're currently on. The moment you need a password for a network you're not actively connected to, or you want to batch-export several at once, netsh wlan show profile name="SSID" key=clear is the faster and more reliable route.