Deleting your personal account

You can delete your personal account on GitHub.com at any time.

In this article

About deletion of your personal account

Deleting your personal account removes all repositories, forks of private repositories, wikis, issues, pull requests, and pages owned by your account. Issues and pull requests you've created and comments you've made in repositories owned by other users will not be deleted. Your resources and comments will become associated with the ghost user.

If the account namespace includes any public repositories that contain an action listed on GitHub Marketplace, or that had more than 100 clones or more than 100 uses of GitHub Actions in the week prior to deletion, GitHub permanently retires the owner name and repository name combination (OWNER/REPOSITORY-NAME) when you delete your account.

If the account namespace includes any packages or container images stored in a GitHub Packages registry, GitHub deletes the packages and container images when you delete your account. By deleting your account, you may break projects that depend on these packages and images.

If the account namespace includes any public container images with more than 5,000 downloads, the full name of these container images (NAMESPACE/IMAGE-NAME) is permanently retired when you delete the account to ensure the container image name cannot be reused in the future.

Note: If your enterprise manages your account and you sign into GitHub through your company's identity provider (IdP), you cannot delete your account. For more information, see "About Enterprise Managed Users."

When you delete your account we stop billing you. The email address associated with the account becomes available for use with a different account. After 90 days, the account name also becomes available to anyone else to use on a new account.

If you're the only owner of an organization, you must transfer ownership to another person or delete the organization before you can delete your personal account. If there are other owners in the organization, you must remove yourself from the organization before you can delete your personal account.

For more information, see the following articles.

Back up your account data

Before you delete your personal account, make a copy of all repositories, private forks, wikis, issues, and pull requests owned by your account. For more information, see "Backing up a repository."

Warning: Once your personal account has been deleted, GitHub cannot restore your content.

Deleting your personal account

  1. In the upper-right corner of any page on GitHub, click your profile photo, then click Settings.
  2. In the left sidebar, click Account.
  3. At the bottom of the Account Settings page, under "Delete account", click Delete your account. Before you can delete your personal account:
    • If you're the only owner in the organization, you must transfer ownership to another person or delete your organization.
    • If there are other organization owners in the organization, you must remove yourself from the organization.
  4. In the "Make sure you want to do this" dialog box, complete the steps to confirm you understand what happens when your account is deleted:
    • Recall that all repositories, forks of private repositories, wikis, issues, pull requests and GitHub Pages sites owned by your account will be deleted. Your billing will end immediately. Your username will be available to anyone for use on GitHub Enterprise Cloud after 90 days.
    • In the first field, type your GitHub Enterprise Cloud username or email.
    • In the second field, type the phrase from the prompt.