How to Change Your Wi-Fi Password on Any Router
Short answer
Open a browser on a connected device and go to your router's address, usually 192.168.0.1, 192.168.1.1 or 10.0.0.1. Log in with the credentials on the router's label, find the Wireless or WLAN section, and replace the password field. Every device in the house will disconnect and need the new password, so change it when you have ten minutes.
On this page
Changing a Wi-Fi password is a two-minute job wrapped in a ten-minute inconvenience. The change itself is a single field in the router’s settings. The cost is that every device in the house falls off the network at once and has to be reconnected by hand.
Worth knowing before you start: this is not the same as the router’s admin password. The Wi-Fi password lets devices onto the network. The admin password lets a person change the router’s configuration. Routers ship with both, printed on the same label, and people regularly change one while assuming they changed the other.
Before you change anything
Decide whether you actually need to. The reasons that justify the disruption:
| Situation | Change the Wi-Fi password? |
|---|---|
| Still using the factory key on the label | Only if it is short or you gave it out widely |
| A former housemate, contractor or ex has it | Yes |
| You wrote it on a whiteboard in a shared office | Yes |
| You think someone is using your connection | Yes, and check connected devices while you are in there |
| Nothing specific, it has been a year | No |
Factory keys on modern routers are usually long and random, which makes them fine as credentials. The problem is never their strength, it is how many people have seen the label.
Write the new password down somewhere before you set it. Locking yourself out of your own network because you mistyped a 20-character string into a field that shows dots is a specific kind of annoying.
Get into the router
Open a browser on a device already connected to the network and try these, in order:
192.168.0.1192.168.1.110.0.0.1
One of those covers the large majority of home routers. Some vendors also accept
a hostname printed on the label, like routerlogin.net or tplinkwifi.net.
If none of them load, your router uses something else and your device already knows what it is — finding your router’s address walks through reading it off Windows, macOS, iPhone or Android in under a minute.
Log in with the admin username and password from the router’s label. These are not the Wi-Fi credentials. If someone changed them and nobody remembers to what, the only way back in is a factory reset, which wipes everything else too.
Some providers do not let you into the router at all and instead give you an app or a web account. In that case the Wi-Fi password lives there, usually under a network or Wi-Fi section.
Find the wireless settings
Vendor interfaces differ wildly, but every one of them has a section named some variation of Wireless, Wi-Fi or WLAN. On routers with a simplified home screen, it is often behind a “Settings”, “Advanced” or gear icon.
Inside that section you are looking for a field labelled one of:
- Password
- Pre-Shared Key or PSK
- Network Key
- Passphrase
- Security Key
They all mean the same thing. Replace the contents, and look for a Show or eye icon so you can confirm what you typed.
If you see two bands listed separately — typically a 2.4GHz entry and a 5GHz entry — change both, and use the same password for each. Different passwords per band creates no security benefit and a great deal of confusion when a device decides to switch bands.
Check the security type while you are there. It should be WPA2 or WPA3, or a mixed mode offering both. If it says WEP or WPA, change it. WEP in particular is breakable in minutes and should not be in use anywhere.
Save or Apply. The router will drop every wireless connection and restart its radios, which takes 30–60 seconds. If you were connected over Wi-Fi, you lose the admin page too — that is expected, not a failure.
Reconnect the house
Everything now shows the network as needing a password. Work through it in this order, because it gets progressively more annoying.
- Phones and laptops. Select the network, type the new password. On devices that remember the old one and keep failing, forget the network first and rejoin cleanly.
- Tablets, TVs and streaming boxes. Same process, worse on-screen keyboards.
- Printers. Many need their network settings redone through the physical control panel, or a USB connection to re-run the setup utility.
- Smart plugs, bulbs and cameras. These are the painful ones. Some rejoin automatically if the network name is unchanged and the password is the only difference; many do not, and need re-pairing through the vendor app.
That last category is why people put this off. If you have thirty smart home devices, changing the Wi-Fi password is genuinely a half-day job, and the alternative is worth considering.
The alternative: a guest network
If the reason you are changing the password is that too many people have it, the better long-term fix is to stop giving out the main one.
Nearly every router made in the last decade has a guest network toggle in the wireless section. It creates a second network with its own name and password, isolated from the segment your printers, NAS and smart home devices live on.
Visitors get that one. When a guest password circulates too widely, you change it and nothing in the house notices, because none of your own devices were using it.
Check who was connected while you are in there
If the reason you are changing the password is a suspicion that someone else is using the connection, the admin page answers the question directly.
Look for a section named Attached devices, Connected devices, DHCP clients or Device list. It shows everything currently holding an address, usually with a name and a hardware address.
Reading that list is less conclusive than people expect. Modern phones and laptops randomise their hardware addresses per network by default, and plenty of devices report unhelpful names or none at all. A list of fifteen entries in a house with fifteen devices is normal; a list of forty is worth investigating.
Count your own devices first, including the easily forgotten ones: smart plugs, bulbs, a doorbell, a thermostat, a printer, a television, a games console, a robot vacuum. Households routinely have twice as many connected things as the occupants would guess.
If the count genuinely does not add up, changing the password removes everything and you can watch your own devices rejoin one at a time.
If devices still will not connect
A few common ones:
- Only one device fails. It cached the old credentials. Forget the network on that device and rejoin rather than retyping the password at the prompt.
- A device connects but gets no internet. Different problem entirely — the password was accepted. The two-minute triage in Wi-Fi connected but no internet separates a DNS fault from a router one.
- A smart device will not pair. Usually a band problem, not a password one. Many only support 2.4GHz and fail if the router is steering them to 5GHz during setup.
- Windows says it cannot connect to this network. Delete the saved profile: Settings → Network & internet → Wi-Fi → Manage known networks → select → Forget.
What a realistic outcome looks like
The password change takes two minutes. Phones and laptops are back within five. Printers and smart home devices account for the rest, and if you have a lot of them, expect to still be finding one that never reconnected a week later — a bulb in a hallway, usually.
Keep the new password somewhere retrievable. Your devices will hold it for you once they have it, but the first person who arrives with a new phone will ask.