If a friend comes over and asks for your home Wi-Fi password, finding the physical slip of paper provided by your internet service provider can be frustrating. If your Windows 11 laptop is already connected to the network, the operating system clearly knows the password, but Microsoft hides it behind a wall of asterisks in the network settings.
Instead of digging through the modern Settings app and legacy Control Panel menus to unmask the password, you can use a powerful, single-line command in the terminal to instantly extract the plaintext password for any Wi-Fi network your computer has ever connected to.
How to Find the Password via Command Prompt
- Click the Windows Start menu, type cmd, and press Enter to launch the Command Prompt. (You do not need to run it as an administrator for this specific task).
- First, you need the exact, case-sensitive name of your Wi-Fi network. If you aren’t sure how Windows saved it, type the following command and press Enter:
netsh wlan show profile
- The terminal will print a list of every network you have ever joined under “User profiles.” Locate the exact name of your current network (e.g., “Netgear_5G”).
- Now, type the extraction command, replacing [Network Name] with your actual Wi-Fi name. Do not forget the quotes if your network name has spaces in it.
netsh wlan show profile name="[Network Name]" key=clear
- Press Enter.
Reading the Output
The terminal will print a large block of highly technical data regarding your radio frequencies and security protocols. Ignore the first half of the text.
Look near the bottom for a section clearly labeled Security settings. Within that section, locate the line labeled Key Content.
The text printed directly next to “Key Content” is your exact, plaintext Wi-Fi password. You can now read it aloud to your friend or copy and paste it into a secure note-taking app for future reference.