How to create a new user on a Mac, and keep the two desktops apart

Creating the account is four clicks. Deciding what kind of account it should be, and knowing what the second login will and will not inherit from the first, is where the time actually goes. A separate account for work, a separate account for a family member, a clean account to test whether a problem is the Mac or the profile: all three end up in the same pane of System Settings, and all three go wrong in different ways if the account type is chosen carelessly.

This covers the mechanics, then the two questions that come up immediately afterwards. What crosses between the accounts. And how to move between them without logging out and losing what was open.

Pick the account type before you click anything

macOS offers three types in the Add User dialog, and one of them is not really a login at all.

Type	Can log in	Can install apps	Can change other users	Typical use
Administrator	Yes	Yes	Yes	The first account on the Mac, or a second trusted owner
Standard	Yes	Yes, and can change their own settings	No	Almost every additional person
Sharing Only	No	No	No	Remote access to shared files only

Apple's description of Sharing Only is unambiguous: those users can reach shared files remotely but cannot log in to the computer or change settings. If a second desktop is the goal, Sharing Only is the wrong answer.

The interesting choice is between Administrator and Standard. An administrator can add and manage other users, install apps and change settings, and a Mac can have several of them. Apple attaches one specific warning to the type: do not set up automatic login for an administrator, because someone could simply restart the Mac and gain access with administrator privileges. It also advises against sharing administrator names and passwords.

For a household Mac, or a machine a contractor will use for a month, Standard is the safer default. It is not a downgrade in daily use, since standard users can still install apps and change their own settings. And it is not permanent: a standard user can be promoted later with a single switch.

Creating the account

Open the Apple menu, choose System Settings, then click Users & Groups in the sidebar. You may need to scroll down. Administrator rights are required for everything below.

1. Click Add User below the list of users. Expect a password prompt.
2. Click the pop-up menu next to New User and choose Administrator, Standard or Sharing Only.
3. Enter a full name. macOS generates an account name from it automatically.
4. Enter the password twice, and a password hint.
5. Click Create User.

Step three is the one step that cannot be undone from this pane. The account name is generated for you, and Apple states plainly that a different account name has to be entered now, because it cannot be changed later. That name becomes the home folder name under /Users, and it appears in file paths, in Terminal, and in the output of anything that reports which user is running. Renaming it afterwards is a separate procedure that also involves the home folder, documented by Apple as its own support article rather than a setting. Ten seconds spent on that field saves an awkward afternoon.

Two per-user options are worth turning on immediately after the account exists. Click the button next to the user name to reach them.

Allow user to administer this computer is how a standard user becomes an administrator later, without deleting and recreating anything.

Allow user to reset password using Apple Account lets that person recover their own login at the login window using their Apple Account. It requires that the user has set up iCloud on this Mac, so it can only be switched on after the first login, not before. It is also unavailable for the Guest User account, and unavailable if FileVault is turned on and already set to allow a reset at startup with an Apple Account.

If the Mac or its Magic Keyboard has Touch ID, the new user can add a fingerprint after logging in. It is per person, not per Mac, and it also becomes the fastest way to switch between the two accounts later.

Groups, briefly

The same pane has Add Group. A group is not a login. It exists so that several user accounts can be given the same access privileges at once, and the place that actually uses it is the File Sharing options in Sharing settings, where permissions on shared folders are set. On a two-person Mac a group adds nothing. On a Mac that serves files to five people with different levels of access, it stops the permissions list from turning into a maintenance problem.

What the two accounts share, and what they do not

This is the part that surprises people, because the split is not where intuition puts it.

Kept apart. The home folder, so Documents, Downloads, Desktop and Pictures. The wallpaper. The Dock. Browser profiles, history and saved passwords in the login keychain. Login items, which macOS lists under General, then Login Items & Extensions, and which are set per account. Almost everything in System Settings that describes a preference rather than the hardware.

Shared, whether or not that was the intention. Apps installed in the main Applications folder, which are available to every account on the Mac. The startup disk and everything on it that has permissive access. The Public folder of each account, which Apple notes is shared automatically when File Sharing is turned on. Anything a user deliberately puts somewhere both accounts can read. And, more subtly, anything a background agent or a system extension installed the first time it ran, because an extension that loads at the system level does not care which account is in front.

A grey area. App licences. Some are stored per user, so the second account sees an unlicensed copy of an app that is fully paid for. Some are stored per machine. There is no rule that covers every app, which is why a fresh account is such a useful diagnostic: if a problem disappears in a new account, the cause lives in the old account's own files rather than in macOS.

That diagnostic value is worth stating on its own. Creating a throwaway standard account, logging in, reproducing the problem once, and then deleting the account is often the fastest way to separate "this Mac is broken" from "this login is cluttered".

Moving between the two without logging out

Logging out to change accounts closes everything. Fast user switching does not: it keeps more than one user logged in at the same time and moves between them.

An administrator turns it on in System Settings. On recent versions of macOS the switch is under Menu Bar in the sidebar, where Fast User Switching appears in the list of controls that can be shown in the menu bar. On macOS 14 and macOS 15 the same control sits under Control Center instead. Either way the pop-up menu next to it decides what appears in the bar: Full Name, Account Name or Icon.

Then switching is a click on that item and a password, or, on a Mac with Touch ID, just a press of the sensor until it clicks. On a Mac with a Touch Bar, rest a finger on Touch ID until the prompt naming the target account appears, then press.

The cost is memory. Both sessions stay live, with their apps still running, so a second account left logged in with a browser and a video call open is not free. On a Mac with plenty of memory this never comes up. On a base-configuration machine it is the reason a second session feels slow.

One other detail decides whether fast user switching is worth turning on at all. Automatic login, set in the same Users & Groups pane, picks one account to be signed in whenever the Mac starts. It is convenient on a machine nobody else can reach, and a bad idea on a shared one, for the reason Apple gives: anyone can get in by restarting. It is also mutually exclusive with full disk encryption, since automatic login is disabled when FileVault is on. On a Mac with two real users, leave automatic login off and let the login window ask.

The menu bar belongs to the account, not the Mac

Because login items are per account, the second account starts with a nearly empty menu bar: the clock, Control Center, whatever Apple shows by default. Nothing that the first account has accumulated appears there until those apps are installed or set to launch for that user too.

That is genuinely useful. A work account can carry the VPN client, the time tracker and the build monitor, while a personal account carries none of them. Setting that up is just a matter of which login items each account has.

It also creates the opposite problem. The moment fast user switching is turned on, every account gains one more permanent item in the menu bar, and set to Full Name it spends that width on a person's name. The account doing real work is usually the one already short of room, since each app that wants a status icon takes space from the same strip, and macOS gives no way to fold the overflow away. Removing an item by holding Command and dragging it out of the bar works, but getting it back means going through that app's own settings.

A menu bar organizer is the answer to the crowding rather than to the accounts: items are sorted into shown, hidden and always hidden, and the hidden ones stay one click away behind a divider instead of being thrown out. Since it runs as a login item, each account keeps its own arrangement, which is the same separation the accounts already give everything else. Worth knowing that a licence for this kind of tool is normally counted per Mac rather than per account, so a second desktop does not mean buying it twice. The pricing page states how many Macs one licence covers.

Deleting the account afterwards

A test account should not outlive the test. Delete User sits behind the same button next to the user name, and Apple notes two cases where the option simply is not there: when that user is currently logged in, and when only one user is set up on the Mac. Log the account out first, from the fast user switching menu or the login window, then delete it.

What to change first

Create the account as Standard, take the extra seconds to set the account name deliberately, and turn on fast user switching so that testing the new account does not mean closing everything in the old one. Then, once the second login has a menu bar of its own, decide what belongs in that strip before it fills up, and reach for a tool that hides menu bar icons on a Mac only if the account doing the real work has already run out of room.