How to delete your GitHub account permanently

By Otabek Mamadaliev · Sources last reviewed 24 August 2026 · What this means

Forks of your repositories survive. Deleting your account removes your copy, but anyone who forked your code keeps theirs. Open source is designed this way — deletion is not a way to un-publish code that others have already taken.

Organisations block deletion, both ways

GitHub will not let you delete the account while you are still attached to an organisation, and there are two separate cases:

• You are the only owner: transfer ownership to someone else, or delete the organisation.
• There are other owners: you still have to remove yourself from the organisation first. Not being in charge does not exempt you.

The second case is the one people miss. An organisation you joined years ago and forgot about will stop the deletion, and nothing on the delete screen explains why.

What actually disappears

• Your repositories — including private ones, permanently.
• Your wikis, issues and pull requests.
• Your GitHub Pages sites — any site published from your account goes offline with it.
• Your contribution graph — years of history, unrecoverable.
• Gists, including secret ones.
• Forks of your private repositories — deleted. Public forks are not; those belong to whoever made them.
• Packages and container images in GitHub Packages. GitHub warns plainly that this may break projects that depend on them — if anything downstream installs your package, it stops resolving.
• Your billing — ends immediately.

Public container images with more than 5,000 downloads have their full NAMESPACE/IMAGE-NAME permanently retired as well, on the same reasoning as the repository namespaces — so the name cannot be claimed and used to serve something else.

Your username is released after 90 days

Not immediately, as often claimed. GitHub holds it for 90 days, after which anyone can register it — which breaks existing clone URLs and lets a stranger occupy your identity in old READMEs.

Popular projects are protected. If your namespace contained a public repo with an action listed on GitHub Marketplace, or one with more than 100 clones or more than 100 Actions runs in the week before deletion, GitHub permanently retires that owner-and-repo name combination. Nobody gets it, including you.

Issues and pull requests you opened on other people's repositories are not deleted — they are reassigned to the ghost user, because removing them would tear holes in project history.

Before you delete

1. Clone everything you want to keep, including private repos and gists.
2. Transfer organisations you solely own — GitHub blocks deletion otherwise.
3. Check for repos others depend on and transfer them rather than deleting.
4. Cancel paid plans and check GitHub Sponsors obligations.

Delete your account

1. Go to Settings → Account.
2. Choose Delete your account.
3. Type your username and the confirmation phrase.
4. Confirm.

Your email address is inside the commits, not just the account

Every commit you have ever pushed carries the author name and email you had configured at the time, and that data lives inside the git history rather than in your GitHub profile. Deleting your account does not rewrite it. Anyone who cloned or forked a repository you contributed to has a permanent local copy of your email address, and so does every mirror of that project.

This is the single most common reason people delete GitHub for privacy, and it is the one thing deletion does not fix. Git is designed so history is tamper-evident; that is the whole point of it, and it does not have an exception for regret.

What you can do instead, while you still have an account:

• Turn on the email privacy settings so future commits use a noreply address, and block pushes that expose your real one.
• Accept the past. Rewriting history on your own repositories is possible but does nothing about forks, clones and mirrors, which is where the copies actually are.
• Change the address rather than chasing it. If the exposed email is one you still use, moving to a new one is more effective than any amount of deleting.

What breaks for other people

GitHub deletion is unusually likely to damage things that are not yours, because software depends on names resolving.

• Package installs stop resolving if anything downstream pulls from GitHub Packages under your namespace. GitHub says so directly.
• Go modules and other direct-from-GitHub dependencies break in exactly the same way — a go.mod pointing at your repository stops fetching.
• GitHub Actions referencing an action in your namespace fail on the next run, in everyone's CI.
• Submodules and vendored references in other projects dangle.
• Clone URLs in READMEs, blog posts and Stack Overflow answers 404 forever.

Transfer, do not delete, anything that others build on. Handing a repository to a maintainer or an organisation keeps every URL working and costs you nothing. Deleting a widely used repository to close your account is the most antisocial action available on this site, and it is entirely avoidable.

Steps checked against GitHub’s personal account reference.