How-To

How to Move the Windows 11 Taskbar to the Top of the Screen

By Brian Burgess

Published July 4, 2021

By default, the Windows 11 Start button and taskbar live on the bottom-center of the screen. But you can put it at the top with a Registry hack.

By default, Windows 11 places the Taskbar and Start button on the bottom center of the screen. It’s possible to move it over to the bottom-left, however, you can’t simply drag it around to different sides of the screen with a drag and drop. You can do that on basically all previous versions of Windows. But there is a trick you can use to move it to the top of the screen. But it does take a Registry hack. Here’s how to do it.

Move the Windows 11 Taskbar and Start Button to the Top of the Screen

To get started, hit the keyboard shortcut Windows key + R to launch the Run dialog. Then type: regedit and hit Enter or click OK.

When the Registry Editor opens up, head to the following path. In fact, to make things easy, copy and paste the following into the box at the top and hit Enter:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\StuckRects3​

When you click on StuckRects3, you will see a binary value named Settings. Click on it to see the contents. At this point, your Registry screens should look like the following:

Find the column FE, row 00000008. The value will be set to 03 by default. Put your cursor before 03 and then hit the Delete key to remove it. Then type in 01 to replace it.

Here is what it should look like after you replace 03 with 01. Note that if you use anything other than 01, it’s not going to do anything. The 01 value will put the taskbar at the top of the screen.

Please restart your computer, and when it comes back, the taskbar should now be at the top of the desktop.  Note that this trick could change sometime in the future before the final release of Windows 11 comes out. And hopefully, by that time, the company will allow you to move it around with ease.

And if you want to adjust things, you can move the Start button and taskbar to the screen’s bottom-left corner. That method is much easier and doesn’t require hacking the Registry.