How to Show/Hide User Profile Fields by Role

Sometimes, your site has sensitive information such as internal notes, user status, or management-related data that should only be visible to specific roles. That’s when you need to conditionally display user profile fields based on user roles in WordPress.

Showing or hiding user profile fields based on roles isn't just about keeping the interface clean. It also helps you build a more secure and efficient user management system.

This approach is especially useful for websites with multiple people involved in content or user management, such as content teams, agencies, or contributor-based platforms.

Before going ahead, let’s check some tools we need for this practice.

Video Version

Before Getting Started

The most important function we need is to add custom fields to the user profiles, then, regulate which fields will be displayed for specific users using PHP code. So, I recommend you use Meta Box AIO in this guide. You’ll have all the advanced functionalities from Meta Box extensions, especially:

• MB User Meta: to create custom fields for users.
• MB Builder: to have a UI in the backend to create fields visually.

It’s time to start.

Create Custom Fields for Users

We have a tutorial about this, so you can refer to it. Here I’ve created a field group already, it’s assigned to the User.

In your case, you can use 40+ field types provided by Meta Box to add fields as you need.

As a result, when you go to the User editing page, you’ll see the created fields. Just enter data for them. Currently, these fields appear on every user's profile, regardless of their role.

Show/Hide Custom Fields by User Role

As I mentioned, we’ll use PHP code for this functionality. Go to your theme file editor to add some code.

add_filter( 'rwmb_meta_boxes', function( $meta_boxes ) {
    $current_user = wp_get_current_user();
    if ( ! $current_user ) {
        return $meta_boxes;
    }
    // the roles is administrator, editor, author, contributor, subscriber
    $field_roles = [
        'admin_note'  => [ 'administrator' ],
        'user_status'  => [ 'administrator', 'editor' ],
    ];
    foreach ( $meta_boxes as &$meta_box ) {
        if ( empty( $meta_box['fields'] ) ) {
            continue;
        }
        foreach ( $meta_box['fields'] as $index => $field ) {
            if ( empty( $field['id'] ) ) {
                continue;
            }
            $field_id = $field['id'];
            if ( isset( $field_roles[ $field_id ] ) ) {
                $allowed_roles = $field_roles[ $field_id ];
                if ( ! array_intersect( $allowed_roles, (array) $current_user->roles ) ) {
                    unset( $meta_box['fields'][ $index ] );
                }
            }
        }
    }
    return $meta_boxes;
}, 20 );

In there:

• rwmb_meta_boxes: is a hook to retrieve data from the fields before displaying them.
• $current_user = wp_get_current_user(): is to get the information of the logged-in user.

// the roles is administrator, editor, author, contributor, subscriber
$field_roles = [
    'admin_note'  => [ 'administrator' ],
    'user_status'  => [ 'administrator', 'editor' ],
];

This is the core logic behind showing and hiding fields by user role. You can change the field ID and the user role. The code is an example; I set the admin_note field displays for the administrator only, and the user_status is shown for both administrator and editor. The remaining fields for all users.

Then, we'll loop through all the meta boxes. For each one, we'll go through its fields and check whether the current user's role is allowed to see them.

Since we regulate the field through its ID, I use $field_id = $field['id'] to get it. And if ( isset( $field_roles[ $field_id ] ) ) { is to check whether it exists in our field-to-role mapping array. If it does, we retrieve the list of roles that are allowed to view that field. Then, we compare those roles with the roles of the currently logged-in user.

The array_intersect() function helps us determine whether the user has at least one matching role. If there is no match, it means the user doesn't have permission to view the field. In that case, we remove the field from the Meta Box configuration before it is rendered on the user profile screen.

Finally, we return the updated list of meta boxes. As a result, users will only see the fields that are available to their roles.

That’s all.

Last Words

With this tutorial, we hope that you can easily control which user profile fields are visible to each user role. It also gives you a flexible way to create role-specific user profiles and show only the information relevant to each group of users.