Custom User Levels are organisation-defined access tiers that let administrators assign rights more precisely than broad fixed roles. They are used to align permissions with actual job duties, reduce over-privileged access, and simplify governance when standard roles are too coarse for operational needs.
Expanded Definition
Custom User Levels are organisation-defined access tiers that sit between rigid role templates and fully bespoke entitlements. In NHI and IAM programs, they are used when standard RBAC groupings are too broad, but per-user exceptions would create governance drift. The practical goal is precision: assign just enough access for a service account, agent, or operator workflow without expanding standing privilege.
Definitions vary across vendors, and no single standard governs this yet. In one environment, a custom user level may be a policy bundle mapped to a job function; in another, it may be a fine-grained permission set layered above application roles. When implemented well, the model supports least privilege, clearer approvals, and easier auditability than ad hoc exceptions. When implemented poorly, it becomes a second role system that is harder to review than the first. For that reason, practitioners often align custom user levels with control objectives described in the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and treat them as governed access constructs rather than convenience labels. The most common misapplication is using custom user levels as a way to bypass role design, which occurs when teams create one-off privileges for urgent access without a lifecycle or review process.
Examples and Use Cases
Implementing custom user levels rigorously often introduces administrative overhead, requiring organisations to weigh precision of access against the cost of maintaining more policies, reviews, and exception workflows.
- A CI/CD service account receives a custom level that can deploy to staging but cannot read production secrets, reducing blast radius while preserving delivery speed.
- An internal AI agent is granted a limited custom level for ticket creation and status lookup, rather than broad support-system access that would exceed its task scope.
- A data engineering pipeline is assigned a custom level for read-only access to specific schemas, avoiding the need to place it in a highly privileged analyst role.
- Security administrators use custom levels to separate approval authority from execution authority, so one operator can request access while another approves it.
- During a governance review, custom levels are mapped back to human-readable duties to confirm they still reflect current operational needs and do not conceal privilege creep.
NHIMG research shows that 97% of NHIs carry excessive privileges, a strong signal that coarse access models leave too much room for over-assignment. That pattern is documented in the Ultimate Guide to NHIs, where access precision is tied to reduced exposure and cleaner lifecycle control. For workload identity patterns, implementation guidance from the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 supports structured access governance rather than informal privilege expansion.
Why It Matters in NHI Security
Custom User Levels matter because NHI environments scale faster than manual access governance can absorb. NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises, and that scale turns small design flaws into systemic exposure. If custom levels are too permissive, they quietly reproduce the same over-privilege problem they were meant to solve. If they are too fragmented, they become difficult to audit, rotate, and offboard. The governance challenge is to keep the model understandable enough for reviewers while still precise enough for machine actors and automation paths.
This is where NHI security, secret management, and Zero Trust converge. A custom level should not imply standing trust, broad network reach, or unconstrained secret use. It should support explicit authorization, narrow scope, and reviewable intent. The operational logic aligns with the Ultimate Guide to NHIs, which highlights the scale of identity sprawl and the need for tighter control of service accounts and API keys. Organisationally, custom user levels become relevant only after access reviews, incident response, or audit findings expose that standard roles were either too broad or too brittle, at which point the model is operationally unavoidable to address.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 and OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 address the attack and risk surface, while NIST CSF 2.0, NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) and NIST SP 800-63 set the governance and control requirements practitioners need to meet.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Non-Human Identity Top 10 | NHI-02 | Custom user levels are a granular access pattern that can either reduce or hide privilege sprawl. |
| NIST CSF 2.0 | PR.AC-4 | Access permissions should be governed to enforce least privilege across users and workloads. |
| NIST Zero Trust (SP 800-207) | Zero Trust requires explicit, context-based authorization instead of broad standing access tiers. | |
| NIST SP 800-63 | AAL2 | Assurance level thinking informs how strongly access must be bound to identity and authentication strength. |
| OWASP Agentic AI Top 10 | A7 | Agentic systems need tightly scoped permissions to prevent tool abuse and overreach. |
Align custom levels with the assurance needed for the connected identity and enforce equivalent authentication strength.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
- How should security teams harden user authentication without building custom auth code?
- What do security teams get wrong about custom user management UIs?
- What breaks when custom widgets can execute with the user’s session and API access?
- When do service accounts become a higher risk than ordinary user accounts?
