How to Find your Windows 10 Product Key

Microsoft has made every effort to make Windows 10 licensing convenient. That said, there are times where product activation might not work according to plan. Whether you want to perform a new install or transfer your Windows 10 license to a new computer; your product key is an important asset you need to have. Depending on how you acquired Windows 10, you might not have a Windows 10 product key, in some cases you do, here is how you find it.

Locate Your Windows 10 Product Key

First, let’s start with a purchased Windows product key or license as it is officially known. Windows 10 is licensed as a digital download or a full packaged product you can purchase at a physical store. Both Microsoft and Amazon.com are the only authorized online merchants from whom you can purchase a digital copy of Windows 10. Any other retailer selling you just a product key is likely not genuine; so, make sure you purchase a license only from Amazon or Microsoft if you decide to go the digital download route.

Another tip, if you buy a license from Amazon, use this link. Some have tried to save a few bucks by purchasing a license from the Amazon marketplace only to later find the license is an MSDN key and not valid.

When you purchase your Windows 10 license from the Microsoft Store, a copy of the product key is stored in your Microsoft Account. Microsoft will also send you a copy of the product key in a confirmation email. If you don’t see the confirmation email, check your junk mail folder. If you still don’t find it, log into the Microsoft Store > Downloads > Product Keys > Subscription page. Then click the Digital Content tab to see your previous purchases along with your product key.

Amazon customers can visit the Your Games and Software Library section of the website to find your product key.

Windows 10 Pro Pack key

When you purchase a Windows 10 Pro Pack using the Easy Upgrade option in Windows 10 Home, you don’t receive a product key. Instead, the digital license is attached to your Microsoft Account; used to make the purchase. If you decide to transfer the Windows 10 Pro Pack to another computer, you can do so using the Activation Troubleshooter.

Transfer Windows 10 Pro Pack Key to a new Computer

1. Open Settings > Update & security > Activation > Troubleshooter.
2. Sign in with your Microsoft Account used to purchase the Pro Pack license.
3. After troubleshooting is completed, Windows 10 will indicate a digital license for Windows 10 Pro has been found.
4. Click Activate Windows then follow the on-screen wizard.

Retail Full Packaged Product

Windows 10 is also available as a retail full packaged product you can buy at a store. Inside the Windows 10 product box, you will find your product key on a small business card at the back. Users should make sure they store the product key in a safe place or have a backup copy. I also recommend you use our trick to take a photo of the key and store it online for safe keeping.

OEM System Builder License

The Windows 10 product key is normally found on the outside of the package; on the Certificate of Authenticity. If you purchased your PC from a white box vendor, the sticker might be attached to the chassis of the machine; so, look at the top or side to find it. Again, snap a photo of the key for safekeeping. After several years, I’ve found these keys like to rub off with normal wear-and-tear.

Find Windows 10 Product Key on a New Computer

The product key for new computers that come preinstalled with Windows 10 has the product key stored within the motherboard firmware. Users can retrieve it by issuing a command from the command prompt.

1. Press Windows key + X
2. Click Command Prompt (Admin)
3. At the command prompt, type:

This will reveal the product key.

Volume License Product Key Activation

If you’re using Windows 10 in a business environment, editions such as Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise and Education don’t use normal product keys. Instead, Domain Administrators set up special KMS (Key Management Service) servers which manage activation across the business network. This eliminates the need for computers to connect to Microsoft for activation. System Administrators responsible for deploying Windows 10 in an organization can find the product key from the Volume License Service Center portal; click the Licenses tab, then click the Key tab for your Windows product.

Imagine or Microsoft Campus Agreement

If you received your Windows 10 license through a Microsoft Campus Agreement or service such as Imagine, formerly called Dreamspark, the product key should be available from the download page after purchase. A purchase confirmation email should also contain a copy of your product key. Some Universities might also use volume licensing. If your University utilizes KMS for handling product activation, then you will not receive a key. Instead, when you join the campus network or VPN in, KMS will activate your system automatically. This also means, when you graduate or end enrolment, you will lose access to the license.

Microsoft Software Developer Network

Subscribers to MSDN, can find their product keys by logging into their subscription, choose the product you would like to view click the product key button.

Lost or Damaged Product Key

Microsoft doesn’t provide much sympathy for customers who lose their product key. In some cases, you might be able to recover your product key using a key finder utility. Otherwise, if you lose it, your only option is to purchase a new one. That is why you should always make a backup copy and don’t throw away the box.

Users who took advantage of the free upgrade offer don’t have a unique Windows 10 key. This is because of the way Windows 10 handles activation; called Digital License. Users who need to transfer their Windows 10 free upgrade to another computer are entitled to a one-time transfer right. There are third-party utilities we have covered in the past for finding your product key; solutions such as Show Key Plus can help if you have difficulty finding the key after upgrading from a previous version of Windows.

Get Help From Microsoft on Windows 10 Activation

Sometimes, after transferring a license or reinstalling Windows 10, you might have trouble reactivating the software. Windows 10 includes a handy chat option you can use to contact a Microsoft support agent, who can help with getting the software reactivated. If you prefer speaking to live person, you can also use phone activation.

1. Press Windows key + R
2. Type: slui.exe 4 then hit Enter
3. Select your country from the list menu
4. choose the option phone activation, the wait for an agent to assist you.

Tell us what you think. Was this article helpful with finding your Windows 10 product key?

How to Find Your Original Windows 10 Product Key

Hint: You might not have to.

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In brief For the longest time Windows PCs came with a product key sticker that was placed outside of the machine or with your computer’s manuals. But in recent years manufacturers started storing this license within the machine’s UEFI/BIOS and the information is automatically retrieved and applied when reinstalling the operating system. Certainly a better approach overall. In other instances, for example if you built and installed your OS, your key is associated with your Microsoft account, so there is no way to «lose it» anymore. Read on for more details.

Microsoft has been changing and improving the way it handles Windows licenses. We’ll cover all you need to know in this article, from old school ways to retrieve keys, to the more modern approaches to make good use of your licenses and what restrictions may apply depending on your type of license.

Windows 10 introduced a «Digital Entitlement» element to Microsoft’s license which links your Windows key to an ID generated based on your PC’s hardware. But because your hardware can significantly change if you upgrade your hardware, this entitlement was expanded to become a «Digital License» when 2016’s Anniversary Update (1607) arrived.

This means your Windows 10 license now ties Windows keys to Microsoft accounts, letting you activate a copy of the operating system simply by logging in with valid online credentials. So, if you have a newer Windows PC or you already log in using your Microsoft account, you generally shouldn’t have to search for your original Windows 10 key. We will explain that in better detail in a minute.

There may be other scenarios where you may still want to manually find a Windows key stored in your UEFI/BIOS, or prevent this key from automatically being applied during installation. Not to mention that different conditions apply for non-OEM retail keys, as well as those given to people who upgraded to Windows 10 for free. And in a worst case scenario, you might be trying to find the license for a copy of Windows that no longer boots.

Editor’s Note: This feature was originally published on December 2018. It’s just as relevant today, so we’ve bumped it as part of our #ThrowbackThursday initiative.

Windows OEM keys vs. retail vs. free upgrade

There are many types of Windows licenses with varying terms of use. As a general rule of thumb:

• OEM keys are shipped with a specific computer and can’t be transferred to another machine. Again, these should be auto-applied from your UEFI/BIOS when reinstalling Windows on a modern boxed PC, but you can also retrieve them manually.
• Retail keys are purchased directly from Microsoft, Amazon etc. — these can be transferred to another machine and that process should happen automatically for a digital license, though you can also «uninstall» a Windows key from a given PC.
• Those who upgraded to Windows 10 for free from Windows 7 and 8 don’t have a unique Windows 10 key. This can only be transferred to one other machine (not if you upgraded from an OEM key). Free upgrade licenses are a digital entitlement.

Do I have a digital license?

The Windows 10 Settings app has a page for displaying your activation information, including whether you have a digital license, though your key isn’t shown here:

Go to: Settings > Update & Security > Activation

If you have a digital license, you should see «Windows is activated with a digital license» or «Windows is activated with a digital license linked to your Microsoft account.»

You can also link a Microsoft account to a Windows license by clicking «add a Microsoft Account» on the bottom of the same page and providing your login information.

Find your key from inside Windows

Entering the following lines into an admin Command Prompt or PowerShell worked to display the OEM key embedded in our system’s UEFI/BIOS. However, these commands didn’t return any keys on other two machines we used for testing despite Windows 10 being activated.

wmic path softwarelicensingservice get OA3xOriginalProductKey

powershell «(Get-WmiObject -query ‘select * from SoftwareLicensingService’).OA3xOriginalProductKey»

There’s also a commonly cited Visual Basic script that retrieves registry-based Windows keys (not those stored in the UEFI/BIOS). You can download the script here. Copy this text and paste it into Notepad, saving it as a .vbs file. Then double-click to launch the file.

Third-party tools that find Windows keys

We downloaded a variety of utilities that can retrieve retail keys from the Windows registry as well as those that are UEFI/BIOS-bound. In testing, some of the applications found both the registry and UEFI/BIOS keys, while others only worked for one or the other:

Nirsoft ProduKey — Found both the embedded OEM key as well as the retail key from our currently running copy of Windows. Also includes keys for many other applications such as Microsoft Office and Adobe products (strangely, Internet Explorer was also included in our results, though no key was provided). As with some of the other tools on this list, ProduKey can load Windows keys from external sources/drives.

ShowKey Plus — This utility also found both our retail and OEM keys, and can load the SOFTWARE hive file from another Windows installation.

Windows 10 Product Key Tool — Made by the developer of EasyBCD, this tool located our UEFI OEM key but didn’t find the retail license on our Windows To Go drive.

Winkeyfinder — Found our retail key but Dell’s UEFI OEM key wasn’t displayed.

Magical Jelly Bean KeyFinder — Returned the retail key but not the UEFI OEM key. This software can also load registry keys from Windows installations on other drives (tools > Load Hive). Listed our Windows 10 Pro install as Enterprise.

Find your key from outside Windows

If you can’t boot into Windows and want to retrieve that key, you can still access this data from an external environment such as a Windows To Go drive, or by attaching your non-booting Windows drive to another machine.

Note that if you’re recovering the key from a Windows To Go workspace, the non-booting drive with your Windows key is offline by default and will have to be enabled in Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc). Right-click the drive and set it as «online.» As mentioned above, several of the third-party tools that we already listed will let you load the registry hive file from another Windows installation.

You can also navigate to your license directly from the Windows registry (regedit via Start) though the key is not in plain text. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ and look for «DigitalProductId» in the right panel.

This registry hive is stored in a file on your OS drive at Windows\System32\Config — look for the file named SOFTWARE.

In testing, both ProduKey and ShowKey Plus loaded the SOFTWARE hive file and displayed the key for an external Windows installation via Windows To Go. Also note that ProduKey can search for Windows keys on computers at remote domains among other locations, and that the Windows Registry Editor can load hive files from other installations:

• Open the Windows Registry Editor (enter regedit via Start)
• Click HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE so it’s selected
• Click File > Load Hive and navigate to the SOFTWARE file in Windows\System32\Config on your other drive
• Enter a name for this external hive file
• The hive should appear as a sub-entry in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
• To unload the hive, select the name you chose and go to File > Unload Hive

Retrieving the UEFI/BIOS-bound Windows key via Linux was as simple as entering the following line in a terminal, though we couldn’t find any GUI applications like ProduKey or ShowKey Plus that would retrieve the license from a registry hive file:

sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM | tail -1

The command-line tool Chntpw can be installed on Linux and is able to load Windows registry files. This software didn’t return a valid key when decoding the product ID within the tool, though if you had to you could extract the hex data and decode that elsewhere.

If you have a boot disc around, Chntpw (also known as Offline NT Password & Registry Editor) is part of many all-in-one recovery solutions such as Ultimate Boot CD and Hiren’s Boot CD.

Here’s how to load a Windows registry file in Chntpw from a Linux terminal and then display the hex value for the key in that hive (use dpi instead of hex to decode the key within chntpw, though again, this didn’t give us a valid key):

chntpw -e YourDrive/Windows/System32/config/SOFTWARE

hex Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\DigitalProductId

Additional resources

Although it’s convenient to have your Windows key automatically detected from the UEFI/BIOS, you’ll have to tweak the Windows installation media if you want to use another license.

Open the installation media in File Explorer, browse to the Sources folder and create a new text file named PID.txt in the Sources folder. In PID.txt, you want the following text, where the Xs correspond to your license key.

Uninstalling a retail key from a given machine is also possible and while this doesn’t automatically update the information on Microsoft’s servers, it will prevent future conflicts from multiple machines using the same key.

Enter the following line in an administrator Command Prompt to uninstall the currently active product license and clear that key from the Windows registry (here are more slmgr commands):

As a final anecdote from testing, when we uninstalled and cleared the key from our Windows installation, we were able to reactivate that copy of Windows simply by clicking «Troubleshoot» on the activation page.

One click and that wizard retrieved our digital license, despite not being linked to a Microsoft account. And again, this was for a retail key that was originally used on a desktop which was cloned as a Windows To Go drive and plugged into another machine with a different hardware profile. In other words, with luck, Microsoft’s activation is forgiving enough and you should have no issues validating your OS license on a new machine or after several hardware changes.