Field-Level Security

Field-level security settings let you restrict users’ access to view and edit specific fields.

Available in: Salesforce Classic

Available in: Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, Developer, and Database.com Editions

Watch Video Demo Who Sees What: Field-Level Security (English only)

Watch how you can restrict access to specific fields on a profile-by-profile basis.

Note

Your Salesforce org contains a lot of data, but you probably don’t want every field accessible to everyone. For example, your payroll manager probably wants to keep salary fields accessible only to select employees. You can restrict user access in:

Detail and edit pages
Related lists
List views
Reports
Connect Offline
Email and mail merge templates
Custom links
The partner portal
The Salesforce Customer Portal
Synchronized data
Imported data

The fields that users see on detail and edit pages are a combination of page layouts and field-level security settings. The most restrictive field access settings of the two always applies. For example, you can have a field that’s required in a page layout but is read-only in the field-level security settings. The field-level security overrides the page layout, so the field remains read-only.

Field-level security doesn’t prevent searching on the values in a field. When search terms match on field values protected by field-level security, the associated records are returned in the search results without the protected fields and their values.

Important

You can define field-level security in either of these ways.

After setting field-level security, you can:

Create page layouts to organize the fields on detail and edit pages.
Use field-level security to restrict users’ access to fields, and then use page layouts to organize detail and edit pages within tabs. This approach reduces the number of page layouts for you to maintain.
Tip
Verify users’ access to fields by checking field accessibility.
Customize search layouts to set the fields that appear in search results, in lookup dialog search results, and in the key lists on tab home pages.

Roll-up summary and formula fields are read-only on detail pages and not available on edit pages. They can also be visible to users even though they reference fields that your users can’t see. Universally required fields appear on edit pages regardless of field-level security.

The relationship group wizard allows you to create and edit relationship groups regardless of field-level security.

Note

Salesforce Security Guide

Field-Level Security