A completely blank lock screen does not exist in Windows 11 - and chasing one wastes an afternoon and occasionally breaks sign-in. This page draws the honest line: which lock screen elements are advertising you can remove, which are information you can choose, and which are simply the lock screen being a lock screen.
After following the fixes, a very common message arrives: 'the ads are gone, but there is still text on my screen.' True - and most of it is supposed to be there. The clock is not an advert and never was; it is the point of the screen. The confusion comes from five different elements sharing one surface, each with a different owner. This page lists them all, says what controls each one if anything does, and names the point at which a clean lock screen is finished - so you can stop at finished instead of hunting further.
Two of these are simply Windows. Chasing them with hacks is where the trouble starts.
Start with the element that generates the most confusion: the time, and under it the date, in large type on the lock screen. There is no supported setting in Windows 10 or 11 to remove them, change their position, or shrink them away. They are the lock screen's primary function - the information a locked PC exists to show. File this under finished: if the only text left on your screen is the clock, your cleanup is complete, and anything further is not a setting but a hack, which the last card deals with honestly.
If a forecast still sits under the clock, you are looking at the detailed status slot, covered fully in the status apps page of this guide. The short version: Settings then Personalization then Lock screen, set the detailed status picker to None, and do the same for the quick status row of mail and calendar counts. These elements survive an ad cleanup because they were never ads - they are app information the lock screen was configured to display, and they leave by their own door.
A different impostor: banners from Mail, Teams, browsers and other apps appearing over your lock screen photo. Those are notifications, governed in Settings then System then Notifications, where lock screen notifications can be switched off entirely, and individual apps can be silenced on the lock screen while keeping their in-Windows alerts. Worth deciding consciously either way, because these previews are also the ones that can show message content to passers-by - a privacy question wearing a tidiness costume.
Click or press a key at the lock screen and you move to the sign-in screen, which shares your background picture if you enabled that in the core guide - but has its own rules. The text there is functional: your account name and picture, the password or PIN prompt, accessibility and power controls. None of it is removable, and none of it should be: a sign-in screen stripped of its prompts would be a locked door with no handle. Judge the cleanup by the lock screen itself, not by what its neighbour must display.
Here is what success actually looks like: your photo, the time and date, and nothing else - no boxes, no links, no weather, no counts. That is a complete result, and it is stable. Against that, be wary of guides and tools promising a fully blank lock screen or a hidden clock: they rely on unsupported system modifications that feature updates routinely break, and lock screen tampering has a special failure mode - a sign-in screen that misbehaves is a machine you cannot log into, which turns a cosmetic hobby into a recovery job. The line is simple: everything removable by a switch, remove; everything else is the product working as designed.
Watch the video to see the realistic end state with your own eyes - a clean photo and the clock, nothing selling anything, nothing pretending the clock can leave.
▶️ Watch Full VideoMethods circulate, and the honest assessment is: fragile, unsupported, and prone to breaking at the next feature update - with the added risk that lock screen modifications gone wrong surface at sign-in, the worst possible place. Microsoft offers no supported switch for it. This guide recommends against it plainly: the clock is the lock screen's purpose, not a defect.
Because the sign-in screen reuses the lock screen's background and parts of its presentation, including the status line. One fix covers both: set the detailed status picker to None on the Lock screen settings page, and the weather disappears from both surfaces.
Those are app notifications, a separate system with its own controls in Settings, System, Notifications. There you can stop notifications appearing on the lock screen at all, or silence individual chatty apps, without touching the lock screen settings you have already perfected.