We renamed a Microsoft 365 group and a security group on our own test tenant on 28 October 2026 and watched what SharePoint did with the new names. Here is the result:
| Where the name shows | Follows the rename? | Who can fix it |
|---|---|---|
| The group-connected site's title | Yes, about an hour later (Microsoft 365 groups only) | Site owner |
| The site's Owners, Members and Visitors groups | No | Site owner |
| The group's name in permissions, on its own site and any other site it was given access to | No, for either kind of group | Site collection admin of each site |
| The site URL | No | SharePoint Administrator |
| The group's email address | No | Exchange or Global admin |
Renaming a team in Microsoft Teams is the same event, because a team's name is its Microsoft 365 group's name. Nothing here touches access. SharePoint grants permission to the group's ID; the name is a label it copied when the site was created, or when the group was first given access, and it does not go back to Entra to check it.
That is why a security group can show its new name in the people picker while the permissions page beside it still shows the old one. The picker asks Entra. The permissions page reads SharePoint's own copy, kept in each site collection's user information list.
Fixing it by hand, one site at a time
The site title
Wait first. A Microsoft 365 group's new name took about an hour to reach SharePoint in our test, and the title then changed by itself. If it has not changed after that, open the site, choose Settings then Site information, and type the group's new name exactly as Entra has it. A security group has no site of its own, so this row only applies to Microsoft 365 groups.
The Owners, Members and Visitors groups
- On the site, go to Settings, Site permissions, then Advanced permissions settings.
- Open the Owners group, then Settings and Group Settings.
- In Name, replace the old group name with the new one and leave the rest of the title alone. On a site created in French, German or any other language, the word for Owners is in that language and may come first.
- Save, and repeat for Members and Visitors.
SharePoint will not let two groups in one site collection share a name. If the new title is already taken, it refuses the change, and you have to pick a different title or rename the other group first.
A renamed group in a site's permissions
This is the hard one, and Microsoft offers no refresh button. The workaround passed around on Microsoft Q&A is to delete the group from the site collection's All People list and add it back. The name does come back right. So does the bill: deleting it from that list takes away every permission it held anywhere in the site collection, on subsites, libraries, folders and single files, and you have to grant each one again. One admin on a hybrid tenant reported the old name returning later the same day.
The cleaner fix is to change only the display title of that group's entry in the site's user information, with CSOM or a PnP PowerShell script, site by site. Change the title and nothing else.
The site address
A SharePoint Administrator can change it under Active sites in the SharePoint admin center. Read Microsoft's Change a site address page first, because the change is not free:
- The site is read-only for about 10 minutes while it moves, and at most 100 addresses can change at once.
- Hub sites, locked sites, sites on hold, Project Web App sites, sites with BCS connections and sites holding more than 15 million documents cannot change address.
- A site joined to a hub has to be associated with it again, SharePoint 2013 workflows have to be republished, and Power Apps custom forms and InfoPath forms that refer to the old URL may stop working.
- A redirect stays at the old address. To reuse that address for another site, you have to delete the redirect.
- The group's email address is not renamed. That takes
Set-UnifiedGroupwith-PrimarySmtpAddressin Exchange Online PowerShell, as Microsoft's group management page describes.
For many renames the right answer is to leave the URL alone. People rarely read it, and the list above is real work.
When one rename touches fifty sites
Every fix above is per site. A Microsoft 365 group rename is mostly one site. A security group used to grant access across a department is a different size of problem: its old name sits on every site it was ever added to, and nothing in the admin centre lists them.
Fix renamed groups, coming to ShareMaster's SharePoint Tools, does this across the sites you pick or the whole tenant:
- Sign in once. No admin consent is needed, and the app certificate reaches every site if you want the whole tenant.
- Choose the sites. The preview reads each one and lists every place a group's name shows, with what SharePoint says beside the group's current name, marked out of date or already right. Nothing changes at this stage, and the preview exports to Excel.
- Tick what to fix. Each name is saved, changed and read back. Owners, Members and Visitors group titles keep their own language, and a title that would clash with another group is reported and left alone.
- Every fix is kept in History with the name it replaced, and Undo puts it back.
It never renames the group in Entra and never changes its email address. A site's address can be changed from the same tool, one site at a time, after SharePoint has checked that the change is allowed, with the list of what it breaks on screen first. More on the feature page.
Questions
Does renaming a Microsoft 365 group rename the SharePoint site?
Only its title, and only after the rename reaches SharePoint, which took about an hour for us. The groups, the URL and the email address keep the old name.
Does an old group name in permissions mean people lost access?
No. The permission belongs to the group's ID. Members keep the access they had, and only the label is stale.
Should I rename the group back to make SharePoint match?
No. Entra is where the name belongs, and renaming it again starts the same drift on whatever has caught up so far. Bring SharePoint up to Entra instead.
Where else might a renamed group keep its old name?
If you have audited permissions recently, older exports will show the old name too. Our guide to auditing SharePoint permissions covers producing a fresh one.