A recovery contact is a trusted person with a Google Account who can help you get back in to your account if you’re unable to sign in. You can have up to 10 recovery contacts for your account.
Make sure to choose a recovery contact who:
- You know well and trust, like a family member or a close friend.
- Can respond within 15 minutes if you need help with your account.
Tips:
- A recovery contact is different from your recovery email.
- Your recovery email is another email address that:
- Helps you recover your Google Account if you can’t sign in to it.
- Gets security alerts and notifications, like suspicious login attempts on your account.
- A recovery contact only helps you get back into your account, and doesn’t get your security alerts and notifications.
Add a recovery contact
- Google Accounts enrolled in the Advanced Protection Program and Google Workspace accounts can’t have recovery contacts. However, they can act as a recovery contact for other eligible Google Accounts.
- Child accounts can’t add recovery contacts or act as a recovery contact for others.
- When you add a Google Account as a recovery contact, you won't get suggestions if:
- The account you're trying to look up is a child account.
- You have an account that hasn't interacted with anyone.
- Open your Google Account.
- Tap Security & sign-in.
- In the “How you sign in to Google” section, tap Recovery contacts.
- You may need to sign in.
- Tap Add recovery contact.
- Enter the email address of a trusted person.
- Once you start to enter an email address, you’ll find a set of suggestions from your contacts and an auto-complete option. You can just pick one from the list or you can choose the auto-complete option.
- Carefully check the email address before you send your request.
- Tap Send request.
- You’ll get a notification that a request was sent to your recovery contact.
- Your recovery contact gets a notification about your request which contains your name, email address, and profile photo.
Tip: The request only lasts for 7 days. Afterwards, you either need to submit another request or choose another recovery contact.
Accept or decline a recovery contact invite
Important:
- A recovery contact request is valid for 7 days.
- If you receive a request to be a recovery contact for someone you don’t know, disregard or decline it.
- You can be a recovery contact for a total of 25 primary accounts. This limit applies to all pending and accepted invites.
If another user requests you as a recovery contact, you’ll get a notification email.
- Go to your Gmail.
- Find the recovery contact request invite.
- Tap Review request.
- You’ll be taken to the Recovery contacts page in your Google Account.
- You may need to sign in.
- Tap Accept
or Decline
.
- If you accept:
- The user gets a notification to let them know that you’re now their recovery contact.
- The notification email will be sent to their primary and recovery email address.
- If you decline:
- The user won’t receive a notification that you declined the invitation.
- The user will know that you’re currently unavailable to be a recovery contact.
- They can’t send you another request for 4 days.
- If you accept:
or Decline 
.
Tip: The request will no longer be available on the Recovery contacts page after 7 days.
Manage recovery contacts & invites
To check and delete pending recovery contact invites, you can go to your Recovery contacts page. From there, you’ll find the current status of the invite.
Tip: If the user hasn't declined your invite, you can resend up to 2 invites a day to avoid spamming. However, if they decline it, you can’t send them another invite for 4 days.
Remove a recovery contact
- Open your Google Account.
- Tap Security & sign-in.
- In the “How you sign in to Google” section, tap Recovery contacts.
- You may need to sign in.
- Tap Trash
.
- To delete a contact, tap Confirm.
Use a recovery contact
Important:
- Before you can use a recovery contact, you need to add them to your account first. There’s a waiting period before the recovery contact can help you recover your account.
- Your recovery contact has up to 7 days to accept your request.
- There’s another 7-day period before you can use them for account recovery.
- You can’t add a recovery contact while you’re locked out of your account or in the account recovery process.
If you can’t sign in to your account, get in touch with your recovery contact.
- A failed login redirects you to the account recovery page.
- You may select your recovery contact from a list of challenges or you may get a prompt to reach out to your recovery contact.
- Tap Get number.
- On the next page, you’ll find a number.
- We recommend you immediately reach out to your recovery contact since the number will expire in 15 minutes.
- Give the number to your recovery contact.
- Your recovery contact will get 3 different numbers on their device. To confirm, they’ll have to select the number that matches the one you gave them.
Tips:
- If your number expires, you may get another number for your recovery contact or you can try to sign in another way.
- If your recovery contact is used but more verification is still needed, your account will be put on a temporary security hold. During this delay, we notify you that an account recovery request has been made. That way, if the recovery contact was used without your knowledge, you have time to deny the request and secure your account. Learn more about how this delay helps protect your account.
