How to Turn On Row Level Security in Power BI

Updated on:

April 6, 2026

By:

Madhav Bhandari

Use this interactive demo to learn how to enable row-level security in your Power BI reports.

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Here’s how to do it:

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Start by navigating to the 'Modeling' tab in the Power BI Desktop ribbon.
Now, select 'Manage Roles' to begin setting up your Row-Level Security.
In the Manage Roles dialog box, click the '+ New' button to create a security role.
Give your role a descriptive name that clearly indicates its purpose.
Select the table that contains the data you want to filter. This is typically a dimension table with user or region identifiers.
Click 'Switch to DAX editor' to create more advanced filtering conditions using DAX expressions. This gives you greater flexibility in defining security rules.
Enter your DAX filter expression.
Click 'Save' to apply your RLS role configuration to the model.
A confirmation pops up once you have successfully implemented Row-Level Security in Power BI.
RLS filters data based on user identity. Users assigned to this role will only see data that meets your filter criteria, keeping sensitive information secure.

📌 Why this matters

Row-level security lets you automatically filter sensitive data based on who's viewing your reports, ensuring sales reps only see their territories or managers access their department's metrics. Beyond basic data protection, this creates a single source of truth that scales across your organization.

Instead of maintaining separate reports for different user groups, you build once and deploy everywhere. Users get personalized dashboards without realizing the underlying dataset contains information they shouldn't access, streamlining both your workflow and compliance requirements.

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