What To Do When PIN Option is Disabled on Windows 10?

Signing in to Windows with a PIN is way easier than patterning my fingers on the keyboard to type out the long password. It’s actually a recommended method as it eliminates the danger of exposing passwords to keep your accounts safe. I use PIN quite exclusively myself on the computers I use regularly so if I need to share it with someone I can just share the PIN instead of the password.

But what to do when the PIN option is greyed out?

Or like this in later version of Windows.

The option will be greyed out and disabled when the computer is joined to a domain. It’s a group policy controlled setting so it can be re-enabled through group policy.

Press Win + R to bring the Run dialog box, type gpedit.msc to open the Local Group Policy Editor. Then navigate to the following location.

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > System > Logon

And enable the setting called Turn on convenience PIN sign-in.

You may need to restart your computer to have the change taken in place.

This will re-enable the PIN sign-in option only if the same option isn’t available in domain-level of Group Policy. If you want to control the setting at the domain level, you will need to download the latest Administrative Template (.admx) for Windows 10 and copy them into the PolicyDefinition folder on the Active Directory server.

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