Changing your GitHub username

About username changes

You can change your username to another username that is not currently in use. If the username you want is not available, consider other names or unique variations. Using a number, hyphen, or an alternative spelling might help you find a similar username that's still available.

If you hold a trademark for the username, you can find more information about making a trademark complaint on our Trademark Policy page.

If you do not hold a trademark for the name, you can choose another username or keep your current username. GitHub Support cannot release the unavailable username for you. For more information, see "Changing your username."

After changing your username, your old username becomes available for anyone else to claim. Most references to your repositories under the old username automatically change to the new username. However, some links to your profile won't automatically redirect.

GitHub Enterprise Cloud cannot set up redirects for:

• @mentions using your old username
• Links to gists that include your old username

If you're a member of an enterprise with managed users, you cannot make changes to your username. For more information, see "Types of GitHub accounts."

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 you renaming your account, GitHub permanently retires the old owner name and repository name combination (OLD-OWNER/REPOSITORY-NAME) when you rename your account. If you try to create a repository using a retired owner name and repository name combination, you will see the error: "The repository <REPOSITORY_NAME> has been retired and cannot be reused."

If the account namespace includes any packages or container images stored in a GitHub Packages registry, GitHub transfers the packages and container images to the new namespace. By renaming your account, you may break projects that depend on these packages. If the namespace includes any container images that are public and have more than 5,000 downloads, the full former name of these container images (OLD-NAMESPACE/IMAGE-NAME) is permanently retired when you rename the account to ensure the container image name cannot be reused in the future.

Repository references

After you change your username, GitHub Enterprise Cloud will automatically redirect references to your repositories.

• Web links to your existing repositories will continue to work. This can take a few minutes to complete after you make the change.
• Command line pushes from your local repository clones to the old remote tracking URLs will continue to work.

If the new owner of your old username creates a repository with the same name as your repository, that will override the redirect entry and your redirect will stop working. Because of this possibility, we recommend you update all existing remote repository URLs after changing your username. For more information, see "Managing remote repositories."

Links to your previous profile page

After changing your username, links to your previous profile page, such as https://github.com/previoususername, will return a 404 error. We recommend updating any links to your profile from elsewhere, such as your LinkedIn or Twitter profile.

Accounts logged in on GitHub Mobile

Accounts logged in on the GitHub Mobile app may continue to display your original username until you log out. To ensure your updated username is displayed, we recommend you sign out and back in to your account on each mobile device.

Your Git commits

If your Git commits are associated with another email address you've added to your GitHub account, they'll continue to be attributed to you and appear in your contributions graph after you've changed your username. For more information on setting your email address, see "Setting your commit email address" and "Adding an email address to your GitHub account."

If you've been using a GitHub-provided private commit email address, whether or not your commit history will be retained after an account rename depends on the format of the email address. Git commits that are associated with your GitHub Enterprise Cloud-provided noreply email address won't be attributed to your new username and won't appear in your contributions graph, unless your noreply email address is in the form of ID+USERNAME@users.noreply.github.com. Older versions of the noreply email address that do not contain a numeric ID will not be associated with your GitHub account after changing your username.

Your gists

After changing your username, the URLs to any public or secret gists will also change and previous links to these will return a 404 error. We recommend updating the links to these gists anywhere you may have shared them.

CODEOWNERS files

After changing your username, CODEOWNERS files that include your old username will need to be manually updated. When you view the CODEOWNERS files on GitHub, an error message is displayed if the file contains any unknown users, or users without write access. We recommend updating all relevant CODEOWNERS files with your new username. For more information, see "About code owners."

Changing your username

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. In the "Change username" section, click Change username.
4. Read the warnings about changing your username. If you still want to change your username, click I understand, let's change my username.
5. Type a new username.
6. If the username you've chosen is available, click Change my username. If the username you've chosen is unavailable, you can try a different username or one of the suggestions you see.

Further reading

• "Why are my commits linked to the wrong user?"
• "GitHub Username Policy"