How to Give Unique Permissions For a SharePoint Library

While working with one of my clients on a SharePoint Document Management System, they requested that I hide specific libraries and content from employees who were not part of particular departments. Additionally, they wanted to assign edit and view permissions to selected users so they could access and manage the content as needed.

In this tutorial, I will explain how to give unique permissions for a SharePoint library step by step. Also, we will discuss the topics below:

• Change the unique permission level in a SharePoint library
• Remove specific user permissions for a particular SharePoint library

Give Unique Permissions For a SharePoint Library

By default, SharePoint inherits security settings, so anyone who has access to a site automatically has access to all its content.

For example, in this case, I have a Controlled Documents Register SharePoint site that contains two document libraries. Currently, three users — Patti, Johanna, and Lidia — have access to the entire site.

There is one SharePoint Document library called Controlled Documents that should be accessible only to Patti and Johanna, but not to Lidia.

Follow the instructions below to create a unique permission for the SharePoint library:

1. Go to the specific Document library (Controlled Documents) -> Gear Settings icon -> Library Settings -> More library settings.

2. Under Permission and management, click on Permission for this document library.

3. On the Permission page, we will see the permissions for this document library, accompanied by the expected message: “This library inherits permissions from its parent” (SharePoint Site).

4. To break the inheritance, click on Stop Inheriting Permissions.

5. A warning message will appear at the top of the page. Click on OK.

6. Now you can see a message like “This library has unique permissions“.

7. To meet the requirement that Lidia should not have access to the Controlled Documents Library, we need to remove the Members group from that library (since both Lidia and Johanna are part of it). To do this, select the checkbox next to the group and click Remove User Permissions.

8. Again, we will see a warning message at the top. Just click on OK.

9. You can see the member group has been deleted from this document library.

10. The steps above removed both Lidia and Johanna from the library, since they were both part of the Members group. However, as Johanna is part of the Controlled Document Register, she needs to be added back.
    • To do this, click Grant User Permissions in the upper-left corner, enter her name (Johanna), choose the appropriate permission level (in this case, Edit), and then click Share.

NOTE:

If you want to share everything whatever present inside the folder including items with unique access, you need to check this option “Share everything in this folder, even items with unique permissions“.

11. Now you can see that Johanna has been added to this Document library with the Edit permission, as shown below.

Change Unique Permission Level in SharePoint Library

If, at a later stage, you want to change a specific user’s permission level in the SharePoint document library — for example, changing Johanna’s permission from Edit to Contribute — follow the steps below:

1. In the SharePoint library Permissions page, select the specific user and click on Edit User Permissions.

2. Under Permissions, uncheck Edit and select Contribute level. Click on OK.

3. Now, the specific user’s unique permission has been changed to Contribute as shown below.

Remove Unique User Permissions From SharePoint Document Library

If you want to delete any user’s unique permission from the specific SharePoint Document library, then select the particular user(s) and click on Remove User Permissions.

Then the warning message will appear at the top of the page. Click OK.

The selected user(s) will be removed from the document library with unique permissions.

You may like some more SharePoint tutorials:

• Share SharePoint Site With External Users and Anonymous Users
• “Sharing is Limited on This Item” Error in SharePoint
• Modern Script Editor Web Part using SharePoint Framework
• SharePoint List View Customization Using JSON Formatting

I hope this article helped you to learn how to create unique permissions for the SharePoint Document library. Also, we discussed how to edit the unique permission level in the SharePoint library. Moreover, we saw how to remove a user’s unique permissions for the SharePoint Document library, providing examples.

Bijay Kumar

After working for more than 18 years in Microsoft technologies like SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI), I thought will share my SharePoint expertise knowledge with the world. Our audiences are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, etc. For my expertise knowledge and SharePoint tutorials, Microsoft has been awarded a Microsoft SharePoint MVP (12 times). I have also worked in companies like HP, TCS, KPIT, etc.