Subaddresses & Accounts

You could run your whole Monero life from a single address — but you would be giving up easy organization and a layer of privacy you get for free. Monero wallets let you create unlimited subaddresses and group them into accounts. In this lesson you will learn what these are, how they improve both privacy and bookkeeping, and how to use them without confusing yourself.

One Wallet, Many Addresses

Every Monero wallet starts with a primary address (the long one beginning with 4). From the same seed, your wallet can generate any number of subaddresses — additional receiving addresses that all funnel into the same wallet. Subaddresses begin with the digit 8 instead of 4, but from your side the money all lands in one place and one balance. Crucially, no outside observer can tell that two subaddresses belong to the same wallet, thanks to Monero's stealth address design.

Why Use Subaddresses?

Two big reasons: privacy and organization.

Privacy. Give a different subaddress to each person or purpose. Because nobody can link them together, no one you transact with can correlate your activity by reusing one public address. This is far better than handing the same address to everyone.
Bookkeeping. A unique subaddress per payer, invoice, or product makes it obvious where each payment came from, even though the funds pool into one balance.

Best practice is to use a fresh subaddress for each new payment or contact. Generating them is free and instant, and they all restore from your single seed phrase — no extra backup needed.

Accounts: Folders for Subaddresses

If subaddresses are like individual receiving slips, accounts are like folders that group them. Each account has its own set of subaddresses and its own sub-balance, all inside the same wallet and the same seed. Accounts let you separate funds by purpose while keeping everything under one backup:

Account 0 — personal spending.
Account 1 — a side business or freelance income.
Account 2 — donations or a shared project.

Funds in different accounts are kept separate in the wallet's view, which helps you avoid accidentally mixing, say, business and personal money. Note that this separation is a convenience and organizational feature within your wallet — it is not a substitute for deliberate privacy practices like those in OpSec for Monero.

How This Interacts With Spending

When you send, your wallet draws on the available outputs in the relevant account. Spreading receipts across many subaddresses naturally creates multiple outputs, which connects to managing outputs and coin control: combining many small outputs in one transaction can make it slightly larger (and thus a bit more in fees), but Monero's low fees keep this minor for everyday use.

A Simple Way to Get Started

Keep it simple at first — most people are fine using Account 0 and generating a new subaddress for each person who pays them.
Add accounts only when you need separation — for example, when a side business makes mixing funds undesirable.
Label everything — wallets let you attach private labels to subaddresses and accounts, turning your transaction list into clear records, which helps when checking your transactions.
Don't over-engineer — you cannot lose funds by using subaddresses; they all restore from the same seed.

What Subaddresses Don't Do

Subaddresses improve receiving privacy and tidiness, but they are not magic. They do not change the on-chain privacy you already get on every transaction, and they are not the right tool for hiding your network identity — that is what Tor and node choice handle. Think of subaddresses as the organizational layer on top of Monero's built-in privacy.

The official user guides show how to create accounts and subaddresses in the GUI and CLI wallets.

Subaddresses and accounts cost nothing, need no extra backup, and quietly boost both your privacy and your record-keeping. A fresh address for each payer is one of the easiest good habits in Monero. Next, let's see how to prove a specific payment happened with Payment Proofs.