12 Character Password Generator

A random 12-character password is a solid everyday length for random passwords. With all 94 printable characters it has about 79 bits of entropy. Use the generator above — it opens at 12 characters, and you can still adjust the length if a site needs something different.

Why 12 characters is a popular recommendation

For years, 12 characters was the length most security organisations recommended as the new baseline, and it remains the default in many enterprise policies and identity providers. A random 12-character password using all 94 printable characters has about 79 bits of entropy — tens of thousands of years of brute force even at 100 billion guesses per second.

The weakness of 12-character passwords is not maths but human habits: Password123! is also 12 characters. The length only delivers its strength when the characters are random, as they are here.

12 characters vs. the new NIST guidance

NIST SP 800-63B Revision 4 now asks for at least 15 characters when a password is the only authentication factor. For accounts with MFA, 12 random characters is more than adequate; for single-factor accounts consider the 15-character generator.

How strong is a 12-character password?

The table shows how many different 12-character passwords exist for each character set, and how long an offline attacker testing 100 billion guesses per second (a multi-GPU rig against a fast hash such as MD5 or NTLM) would need on average to find a randomly generated one.

Strength of a random 12-character password by character set
Character set	Possible passwords	Entropy	Average time to crack
Numbers only (0–9)	1.0 × 10¹²	40 bits	about 5 seconds
Lowercase letters	9.5 × 10¹⁶	56 bits	about 6 days
Letters (A–Z, a–z)	3.9 × 10²⁰	68 bits	about 62 years
Letters + numbers	3.2 × 10²¹	71 bits	about 511 years
All printable characters	4.8 × 10²³	79 bits	about 75,405 years

These figures assume the password is truly random. A 12-character password built from a word, a name or a date can be cracked in a tiny fraction of this time. Check any password with the strength checker.

Other password lengths

Last updated: November 7, 2026 · Reviewed by the Password Generator team

Frequently asked questions

Is a 12-character password secure?

Yes, if it is random. With all four character types it has about 79 bits of entropy, which is beyond practical brute-force today. Patterned 12-character passwords like Summer2026!! are weak despite their length.

How long to crack a 12-character password?

For a random 12-character password with all character types, about 80,000 years on average at 100 billion guesses per second. A predictable one may fall instantly to a dictionary attack.