Allowed Characters in a PSN Name

PlayStation Online IDs support letters (A-Z), digits (0-9), underscores (_), and hyphens (-). The first character must be a letter. That keeps IDs readable across consoles, apps, and friend lists.

Allowed

Stay inside this set and you clear the first format gate. Anything else usually fails immediately.

• Letters a-z / A-Z (styling may vary; uniqueness rules treat case specially, see the case guide).
• Numbers 0-9 (not as the first character).
• Underscore _
• Hyphen / minus -

Not allowed

These are the usual rejection triggers. Fix them before you blame "name taken."

• Spaces
• Emoji and symbols like @ # ! * $ %
• Starting with a number or underscore/hyphen
• Most punctuation and accented specialty characters outside the basic set PlayStation accepts in the Online ID field

Design tips using only legal characters

Use CamelCase (ShadowArc) or one separator (Shadow_Arc). Two separators can still be valid but often look messier.

A single trailing number is usually cleaner than a four-digit year spam suffix, unless that year means something real to you.

Limitation: fancy Unicode lookalikes from social media often look identical to Latin letters and then fail on PlayStation. Retype on a plain keyboard.

Related guides

• No spaces rule
• Typing & input errors
• Character limit