A random 20-character password is a high-security choice for email, banking and admin accounts. With all 94 printable characters it has about 131 bits of entropy. Use the generator above — it opens at 20 characters, and you can still adjust the length if a site needs something different.
Which accounts deserve 20 characters?
Your primary email can reset every other password, so it deserves the strongest protection. The same goes for banking, cloud storage, domain registrars, DNS and hosting panels, and any administrator account. A random 20-character password delivers about 131 bits of entropy — well past the 128-bit level used for modern encryption keys.
Future-proofing
GPU cracking speed keeps improving, and stolen password hashes can be stored and attacked for years. A 20-character random password stays out of reach even if hardware becomes millions of times faster. Since a password manager remembers it for you, the extra length costs nothing.
20 characters for Wi-Fi
Twenty characters is also our default for Wi-Fi passwords: strong against offline handshake cracking, yet short enough to type on a TV remote.
How strong is a 20-character password?
The table shows how many different 20-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.
| Character set | Possible passwords | Entropy | Average time to crack |
|---|---|---|---|
| Numbers only (0–9) | 1.0 × 1020 | 66 bits | about 16 years |
| Lowercase letters | 2.0 × 1028 | 94 bits | about 3.2 billion years |
| Letters (A–Z, a–z) | 2.1 × 1034 | 114 bits | far longer than the age of the universe |
| Letters + numbers | 7.0 × 1035 | 119 bits | far longer than the age of the universe |
| All printable characters | 2.9 × 1039 | 131 bits | far longer than the age of the universe |
These figures assume the password is truly random. A 20-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
- 8 characters
- 10 characters
- 12 characters
- 14 characters
- 15 characters
- 16 characters
- 20 characters
- 24 characters
- 32 characters
- 64 characters
Last updated: · Reviewed by the Password Generator team