How to Delete a User on Mac, with Photos

It’s not something we often do, but there are some good reasons for deleting a user account from your computer. Perhaps the computer has changed hands, and you want to remove a pre-existing user. Or maybe you’ve purchased a newer model and want to get rid of your user data before departing with your PC. Either way, deleting a user on Mac is simple.

The process is the same whether you’re using a MacBook, iMac, Mac Mini or Mac Studio. However, it’s not always intuitive and can be hard to figure out by yourself. Save yourself a headache and follow our easy steps below to delete your account.

How to Delete a User Account on Mac

You don’t need any special software or tools to delete a user on a mac. First things first, take a look in the top left corner of your screen and you’ll see the familiar Apple logo. This is where you need to go to delete a user.

Step 1: Locate System Preferences

On your Mac, click the Apple icon in the top left corner to bring up the Apple menu.

Step 2: Open the System Preferences Menu

From here, click on System Preferences from the drop-down list to bring up the preferences window.

Step 3: Bring up the User Accounts

Next, click on the icon labelled ‘Users & Groups’. The current user and other users of the Mac will be displayed in a box on the left.

Step 4: Check You’re Logged Into an Admin Account

Before you can delete a user, you’ll need to be logged in as an admin. If your current account is an admin, you’ll see the word ‘Admin’ below your name. Otherwise, you’ll have to log out and log into whichever account is displayed as the admin.

Step 5: Unlock Changes

Once logged in as admin, click the padlock symbol in the bottom left corner. This will bring up a prompt to enter your admin password.

After entering your password and clicking ‘Unlock’, you’ll be able to make changes to the user accounts.

Step 6: Select the User Account You Want to Delete

Once permissions are unlocked, highlight the user account you want to delete by clicking on it.

Step 7: Delete the User Account

Afterwards, click the minus symbol in the bottom left to bring up a prompt. From here, click ‘Delete User’ on the right to delete the account.

How to Save User Data Before Deleting the Account

If you leave the checkbox for ‘Save the home folder in a disk image’ ticked, then all of that user’s information and documents will be archived in the ‘Users/Deleted Users/’ folder. This means all this user’s files can be restored at a later date if you need to.

Alternatively, if you tick the ‘Don’t change the home folder’ box, all the user’s data will be saved in their home folder on the Mac. This is located in the ‘Users/’ folder.

If you’re sure you want to delete all of this user’s data, then check the third box, ‘Delete the home folder’. Be very sure you want to do this before clicking delete!

Wrapping Up

All in all, you can see now it’s a fairly easy task to delete a user account on a Mac, as long as you have access to the admin account. Just be sure of what you want to do with the user data before you hit the delete button. Macs give you a lot of options for restoring this data, but if you don’t take advantage of these, it’s a lot more complicated to restore the data.

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