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.

    Warning: If you protect your personal account with two-factor authentication but do not know your password, you will not be able to follow these steps to recover your account.GitHub can send a password reset email to a verified address associated with your account. For more information, 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 passkey

If you have added a passkey to your account, you can use your passkey to automatically regain access to your account. Passkeys satisfy both password and 2FA requirements, so you don't need to know your password in order to recover your account. See "About passkeys."

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