How to Fix "You must be in the docker-users group" Error in Docker Desktop

I recently ran into an issue with Docker Desktop on my Windows computer.

Error: docker-user group

I tried opening Docker Desktop and was prompted with this error:

You are not allowed to use Docker
You must be in the "docker-users" group

Let’s see how we can go about adding our user to the docker-users user-group.

1. Find username

First, we need to figure out what our username is.

1. Open Windows + R
2. Type netplwiz and press Enter

This will list all User IDs of the computer.

Find the appropriate username, and remember what it is.

2. Add username to the user-group

Next, let’s open up Windows PowerShell as administrator.

Then, let’s run this command.

net localgroup docker-users "username" /ADD

If we’re on a work computer and in a corporate domain, we can prepend our username with our domain.

net localgroup docker-users "DOMAIN\username" /ADD

3. Log out of Windows

Lastly, let’s log out of Windows, and then immediately log back in.

If we don’t do this, we might end up with this error:

You need to log out of Windows
Then your "docker-users"
membership will be taken into
account