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.

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.

  1. Navigate to https://github.com/login.
  2. To prompt two-factor authentication, type your username and password, then click Sign in.

    Note

    If you have linked a Google account to your GitHub account, you can sign-in with your social login instead of using your password.

  3. Under "More options", click 2FA recovery code.
  4. 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