diff --git a/CTFd/config.py b/CTFd/config.py
index 9f9bc515..270f9ba1 100644
--- a/CTFd/config.py
+++ b/CTFd/config.py
@@ -195,7 +195,7 @@ class ServerConfig(object):
 
     HTML_SANITIZATION: bool = process_boolean_str(empty_str_cast(config_ini["optional"]["HTML_SANITIZATION"], default=False))
 
-    SAFE_MODE: bool = process_boolean_str(empty_str_cast(config_ini["optional"]["SAFE_MODE"], default=False))
+    SAFE_MODE: bool = process_boolean_str(empty_str_cast(config_ini["optional"].get("SAFE_MODE", False), default=False))
 
     if DATABASE_URL.startswith("sqlite") is False:
         SQLALCHEMY_ENGINE_OPTIONS = {