Recovering your account if you lose your 2FA credentials

If you lose access to your two-factor authentication credentials, you can use your recovery codes, or another recovery option, to regain access to your account.

In this article

Using a two-factor authentication recovery code

Use one of your recovery codes to automatically regain entry into your account. You may have saved your recovery codes to a password manager or your computer's downloads folder. The default filename for recovery codes is github-recovery-codes.txt. For more information about recovery codes, see Configuring two-factor authentication recovery methods.

  1. Type your username and password to prompt authentication.

    Note

    If you do not know your password, you can use a recovery code after requesting a new password. See Updating your GitHub access credentials.

  2. Under "Having problems?", click Use a recovery code.

  3. Type one of your recovery codes, then click Verify.

Authenticating with a security key

If you configured two-factor authentication using a security key, you can use your security key as a secondary authentication method to automatically regain access to your account. For more information, see Configuring two-factor authentication.

Further reading