Facebook account recovery: every official route, and which one is yours

Facebook account recovery sounds like one thing and is really four, each with a different door and a very different waiting time. People get stuck because they try the wrong one repeatedly and conclude the account is lost, when in fact they simply needed the other door. This page lays out all four, plainly, so you can tell which is yours before you start rather than after an hour of trying.

Last checked: 15 August 2026. Every official Facebook, Instagram and Australian government link on this page was opened and confirmed working on that date. If you find one that no longer works, please tell us and we will fix it, because a dead link on a page like this is worse than no page at all.

The four routes, in plain words

1. Password reset. You still have the email address or mobile on the account. Facebook sends a code, you set a new password. Minutes.
2. Compromised account flow. Somebody else has been in. This is facebook.com/hacked, and it both gets you in and walks you through securing it. Minutes to an hour.
3. Identity confirmation. The contact details were changed, so there is nowhere to send a code. Facebook asks you to prove who you are instead. Commonly several days, and it does sometimes fail.
4. Disabled account review. Facebook has switched the account off, often because of what somebody did with it after taking it. A separate review process with its own timescale.

Route one and two: you still have your email or phone

If you cannot get to the form because you cannot find the account at all, start at facebook.com/login/identify and identify it by name, by an email address you used to use, or by an old phone number.

Facebook explains the general case here: recover your account if you cannot log in, and the compromised case here: recover a hacked account.

Route three: identity confirmation

This is where you land when the email address and phone number on the account are no longer yours. Facebook cannot send you anything, so instead it asks you to demonstrate that you are the person whose account it is.

Two honest notes about this route. It is slow, commonly several days, and sometimes it does not succeed, which is a real outcome rather than something you did wrong. And it happens entirely inside Facebook's own pages. Nobody will message you to collect your documents, and if somebody does, that is the scam, not the process.

Route four: the account is disabled

What none of the routes involve

• A phone call. There is no Facebook support number for personal accounts, so there is nothing to ring and nobody who will ring you.
• A payment. Every official route is free. A fee means a scam, without exception.
• Somebody else doing it for you. No third party has access that you do not, so anybody offering is either wasting your money or taking your account.
• Sending documents to a person. Identity confirmation happens inside Facebook's own pages, never by email or message to somebody who contacted you.

After you are back in

1. Change the password, and change it anywhere else you used the same one. If that password was also on your email or your banking, those come first, before the social account.
2. Check the recovery email address and phone number on the account and remove anything you do not recognise. This is the step people skip, and it is the reason accounts get taken a second time a week later.
3. Sign out of all other sessions, so a device the attacker is still holding gets kicked off.
4. Turn on two factor authentication, so a stolen password on its own is no longer enough.
5. Look at what was posted or sent while they had it, so you know what your friends and family received.
6. Tell the people who were messaged, ideally somewhere other than the account that was taken.

Related pages on this site

• My Facebook account has been hacked , if somebody else got in.
• The router , if you want to be walked through it.
• There is no Facebook phone number .
• Locked out of your computer , a different lockout.