How to Recover a Monero Wallet With Your Seed Phrase

What your 25-word seed phrase actually is

A Monero seed is a list of 25 words drawn from a fixed dictionary of 1626 words. The first 24 words encode the 256 bits of your private spend key. The 25th word is a checksum computed from the other 24, and its only job is to let wallet software notice a typo or a swapped pair before it silently builds a wallet you have never owned.

From that spend key the wallet derives the private view key, then both public keys, then your address and every subaddress you will ever generate. Nothing else is needed and nothing else is stored. That is why a seed alone rebuilds the wallet on any machine, and why no server anywhere holds a copy you could ask for.

The English wordlist is also built so that each word is identified by a short prefix rather than its full spelling. This is why some wallets will accept a seed where the endings are truncated, and why a smudged final letter is often survivable. It is not permission to be careless, but it is a useful thing to know when you are squinting at a piece of paper from three years ago.

This matters because the seed is not a password and it is not linked to any account. There is no reset button and no recovery email. Whoever holds the 25 words controls the wallet. That is the whole point of self-custody, and it is also why a single backup mistake can be permanent.

Not every Monero seed is 25 words

The 25-word mnemonic is Monero's native format, but it is not the only thing people have written down. Before you start typing anything, count the words and work out what you are actually holding.

A 13-word seed is the MyMonero format. It carries less entropy than the 25-word version and it is only understood by wallets that implement it, which in practice means MyMonero itself and a small number of others such as Cake Wallet. If you hold 13 words, look for a restore option that explicitly mentions a 13-word or MyMonero seed rather than assuming the standard restore screen will take it.

A 16-word seed is most likely Polyseed, a newer format that encodes the wallet creation date inside the seed itself, so a restore does not need you to remember a block height. Feather supports it and other wallets have been adding it. Polyseed and the classic 25-word format are not interchangeable, so a Polyseed can only be restored in software that implements Polyseed.

A 12-word or 24-word backup is almost certainly not a Monero seed at all. Those lengths belong to BIP39, the format used by Bitcoin wallets and by hardware devices. If you used Monero on a Ledger or a Trezor, your Monero keys were derived from the device's own recovery words and there is no separate 25-word Monero mnemonic to hunt for. You restore the device from its recovery words and then reconnect it to Monero wallet software.

A seed is also not the only backup that works. A wallet keys file, the small encrypted file that sits beside your wallet, contains the same keys, and if you still have that file and its password you can open the wallet directly with no restore and no rescan. The larger cache file next to it holds only scanned history and can be deleted without risk.

Before you start: gather the right pieces

You need the full 25-word seed in the correct order. If you only have the first 24, most wallets can still recover because the 25th word is just a checksum, but it is best to have all of them.

If you set an optional passphrase on top of your seed, sometimes called a seed offset or 25th-word passphrase, you also need that exact string. It is case sensitive and is not stored anywhere. A seed plus a passphrase produces a completely different wallet than the seed alone, so a wrong or forgotten passphrase will silently restore an empty wallet rather than throw an error.

You may also want your wallet creation date or block height. This is optional, but providing it makes the restore scan much faster because the wallet skips every block before that point.

Finally, decide where you are going to do this. A restore is the one moment when your entire wallet exists in plain text in front of you, so it should happen on a machine you trust, with wallet software you obtained and verified yourself.

Restore height, and why the wrong one costs you hours

Restore height is the block number where the wallet starts scanning. It exists because a Monero wallet cannot ask a node whether an address has funds. Privacy means the wallet has to pull down blocks and test every output against your keys locally, so the only way to make a restore fast is to skip the blocks from before your wallet existed.

Set the height too late and the wallet will never see transactions that happened before it. Your balance comes out wrong and the missing coins look lost, even though they are sitting in the wallet untouched and will appear the moment you rescan from an earlier point. This is the single most common reason a correct seed appears to restore an empty wallet.

Set it to zero and the result is always correct, but the wallet scans from the very first block. Against a remote node on an average connection that can mean many hours of work you did not need to do, and on a phone it can mean a scan you never realistically finish.

The safe habit is to go earlier than you think rather than later. If you know roughly the month you created the wallet, pick a height from a few weeks before that. The official GUI lets you enter a date instead of a block number and converts it for you. Monero targets a two minute block, so a day is roughly 720 blocks, which is enough to estimate a height by hand if you need to.

If you get it wrong you are not stuck. Every serious wallet lets you lower the restore height afterwards and rescan from the new point. In the command line wallet that is set_restore_height followed by rescan_bc, and the graphical wallets expose the same thing as a rescan option in settings. Rescanning never touches your keys and cannot lose funds. The only cost is time.

Recovering in the official GUI wallet

Open the Monero GUI, choose to restore a wallet, and select restore from seed. Type the 25 words into the seed field, separated by single spaces. Set a new wallet file name and a new local password. That password only protects the file on this machine and has nothing to do with your seed.

If you know roughly when the wallet was first created, enter the restore height or date in the advanced options. Then let the wallet connect to a node and synchronize. During the scan it checks every transaction against your keys and rebuilds your balance and history.

Recovering in the CLI or other wallets

In the command line wallet, run the restore command, often monero-wallet-cli with the restore-deterministic-wallet flag, then paste your seed when prompted. You will set a new file name, a new password, and an optional restore height.

Mobile and third-party wallets such as Feather, Cake, Monero.com, Monerujo, and Stack follow the same logic even if the menus differ. Look for an option labeled restore or import, choose seed phrase, and enter the 25 words. Key derivation is part of Monero rather than any particular app, so a seed created in one wallet can be restored in another as long as both handle the same seed format.

The details vary in small ways. Feather asks for the seed and then offers a restore height or a date on the same screen. Cake Wallet and Monero.com present a creation date field and are among the wallets that can also take a 13-word MyMonero seed. Monerujo restores from the 25 words and then asks you to choose a node before it begins scanning. In all of them the new local password you set protects the wallet file on that device and has no relationship to your seed.

Restoring the same seed into two wallets at once is harmless. A seed is not a session and there is no lock anywhere. Both wallets scan independently and arrive at the same balance. The only real consequence is that your keys now exist on two devices instead of one, which is a security decision rather than a technical problem.

View-only restores and what they can show you

You can also restore a wallet from your address and your private view key instead of a seed. The result is a view-only wallet. It scans the chain and shows incoming payments, but it holds no spend key, so it cannot sign a transaction and cannot move a single piconero.

This is genuinely useful. It lets you watch a balance on a laptop, a server, or a phone without carrying the ability to spend, and it is the normal way to run monitoring or bookkeeping alongside a wallet kept offline. It is also what a hardware wallet setup does behind the scenes, since the desktop software needs the view key to scan the chain while the device keeps the spend key to itself.

Two limits are worth knowing. A view-only wallet sees money arriving but cannot reliably tell what has already been spent, because identifying spent outputs requires key images that only the spend key can produce. The fix is to export key images from the full wallet and import them into the view-only one, which both the GUI and the CLI support.

The second limit is that a view key is still sensitive. Anyone you give it to can see every payment that wallet will ever receive, permanently. It cannot spend, but it is not harmless, and it should not be pasted into a support ticket or a website.

Why your balance might look wrong at first

A freshly restored wallet has to scan the blockchain to find your outputs. Until the sync reaches the present block, your balance can show as zero or as lower than expected. This is normal and does not mean funds are missing. Let it finish.

Syncing the full chain can take a while, especially against a remote node or on a slow connection. If you set a restore height that is too late, the wallet will miss earlier transactions, so when in doubt set the height earlier rather than later, or set it to zero and accept a longer scan.

Common mistakes that cost people their XMR

The biggest one is a transcription error. People misread their own handwriting, swap two words, or drop a word. The checksum catches many typos but not all reorderings. Read each word carefully and confirm the wallet accepts the seed without a checksum warning.

The second is forgetting the optional passphrase. If you ever added one, the seed alone restores a different, empty wallet, and it is easy to assume the funds are gone when they are simply in the passphrase-protected version.

The third is trusting a seed you typed into an untrusted website or app. Never enter your 25 words anywhere except wallet software you control. No legitimate service, exchange, or swap needs your seed. A non-custodial swap, for example, only ever needs a receiving address, never your private keys.

Restore errors and what they usually mean

An invalid word or unknown word message means one of your words is not in the Monero dictionary. Look for a misread letter, a word taken from a BIP39 list that Monero does not use, or a seed written in one language being restored with another language selected. Monero wordlists exist in several languages and they cannot be mixed, so a Spanish seed needs the Spanish wordlist.

A checksum failure means all 25 words are real dictionary words but the 25th does not match the other 24. That is nearly always a transcription error or two words in the wrong order. It is the checksum doing exactly what it exists for, and it is far better than quietly building a valid wallet that has never held your coins.

Restores cleanly but shows a zero balance is the outcome that frightens people most, and it has three usual causes. The wallet has not finished scanning. The restore height was set too late. Or the wallet was created with a passphrase you have not supplied, in which case you have restored a real but empty wallet that is simply not yours. Work through those in that order before assuming anything worse.

Failed to connect to daemon, or a wallet whose block height never moves, is a node problem rather than a seed problem. Point the wallet at a different node, or start your own, and the scan will begin. A wallet that is scanning has a height that climbs. A disconnected one sits perfectly still.

Wallet already exists or a file name error means you picked a name that is already present in your wallet directory. Choose a different name. It says nothing about your seed.

If the seed is damaged, incomplete, or out of order

A partially lost seed is not automatically a lost wallet. How much hope you have depends precisely on what is missing.

One missing word is very recoverable. There are 1626 words in the list and you know which position is blank, so trying every candidate and checking the result against the checksum takes seconds on any computer. Two missing words is a few million combinations, which is still well within reach of an ordinary machine and the right open-source tool.

Wrong order is harder. If you know that two adjacent words were swapped, that is a handful of attempts. If the whole phrase was copied down in a scrambled order, the number of possible arrangements is astronomically large and there is no realistic recovery. The same goes for a seed with several unknown words at once. Be honest with yourself about which of these you have before you spend a month on it.

Ambiguous handwriting is often the easiest case, because of the prefix property of the wordlist. If you can read the first few letters of a word, there is usually only one dictionary word it can be. Work the candidates out by hand against the official wordlist before concluding anything.

Be extremely careful about who helps you. A nearly complete seed is worth exactly as much as a complete one to a thief, and paid seed recovery services are a natural place for theft to hide. If you need a brute force tool, use open-source software, read what it does, and run it on a machine with no network connection.

Staying safe while you restore

Download wallet software only from the project's own release channel and verify it before you run it. The Monero project publishes signed hashes for its binaries, and checking them takes a minute. Convincing fake Monero wallets that quietly forward the seed to an attacker have been distributed through search ads and lookalike domains more than once, and a restore is exactly the moment they are built to catch.

Never type your seed into a website, a browser extension, a chat window, or a support form. There is no legitimate reason for any service to see it. Anyone asking for your 25 words is trying to steal from you, no matter how official the request looks or how urgent it sounds.

If the reason you are restoring is that your old device behaved strangely, was lost, or may have been compromised, do not restore onto that device and do not restore onto anything that shared it. Use a clean machine. Once the funds are visible, move them to a wallet built from a seed the suspect machine has never seen.

Avoid photographs, screenshots, and cloud notes throughout. It is very easy to leave an image of a seed in a synced photo library and forget about it for years, and that image is your wallet.

After recovery: tighten your backup

Once you are back in, treat this as a chance to fix whatever went wrong. Write the seed on paper or stamp it into metal, store it offline, and keep at least one copy in a separate physical location. Do not photograph it, do not store it in a cloud notes app, and do not paste it into a password manager that syncs to the internet if you can avoid it.

If you suspect your seed was ever exposed, the safe move is to create a brand new wallet and send your funds there. Because Monero transactions are private, moving to a fresh seed cleanly separates you from any wallet that might be compromised.