How to get Facebook Recovery Login Codes if you don’t have your Phone

January 13, 2021

By Alex Balaniuc

If you enabled two-factor authentication on your Facebook account, then you’ll know that every time you want to log in to the account from an unknown device, a message containing a login code is sent to your phone to make sure that it is actually you. What if your phone is out of reach, though? You won’t be able to access your FB account, because you can’t enter the verification code. Right? Not really, and we’re going to explain why in this article.

Two-factor authentication for improved security

First of all, why would someone enable two-factor authentication for logging into their FB account? We mentioned earlier that this method is used whenever you (or someone else) try to access your account by sending a code to your phone that verifies that it is you who’s trying to log in; so, you might have guessed for which reason TFA is applied.

How does it work? TFA is a security feature that helps protect your Facebook account in addition to your password. So, if you have TFA set up, meaning that you connected your phone number to your FB account, Facebook will ask you to enter a special login code sent to your phone, or to confirm the login attempt if it was made from a different browser or mobile device from usual. Also, you will get alerts whenever someone tries to get into your FB account from an unknown browser\device.

Enable two-factor authentication

This is how to set up two-factor authentication:

go to your “Security and Login Settings” (here)

scroll down to Use two-factor authentication and click Edit

then choose the security method you want to add and follow the on-screen instructions

There are two security methods:

login codes from a third party authentication app (want to learn more? Go here)
text message (SMS) codes from your mobile phone (learn more here)

You’ll need to have at least one of these set up in order to use two-factor authentication. Once you have added either text message (SMS) codes or a third party authentication app on your account, you can also set up some of the optional methods below:

approving your login attempt from a device Facebook recognizes
using one of your recovery codes (we’ll talk about these in the paragraph below)
tapping your security key on a compatible device (go here to learn more)

What are recovery login codes?

Now, to get to the gist of the article, once you’ve turned on two-factor authentication, you can get ten recovery login codes to use when you’re unable to use your phone.

Here’s how to get your codes:

login to your Facebook account
go to Settings > “Security and login“
under the Two-factor authentication section, click Use two-factor authentication; you may need to re-enter your password
next to Recovery codes, click Setup then Get codes. If you’ve already set up recovery codes, you can click Show codes

Save the ten codes that appear somewhere, maybe print or write them down. Keep in mind that you’ll only be able to use each code once. If you run out of codes or lose them, don’t worry, you can request new ones by clicking get new codes