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Reinstating a former member of your organization

You can invite former organization members to rejoin your organization, and choose whether to restore the person's former role, access permissions, forks, and settings.

Who can use this feature?

Organization owners can reinstate a former member of an organization.

About member reinstatement

If a user is removed from your organization in one of the following ways, the user's access privileges and settings are saved for three months.

You can restore the user's privileges if you invite them back to the organization within that time frame.

If your organization has a paid per-user subscription, an unused license must be available before you can reinstate a former organization member. For more information, see "About per-user pricing."

Items that are restored for reinstated members

When you reinstate a former organization member, the following items can be restored:

  • The user's role in the organization
  • Any private forks of repositories owned by the organization
  • Membership in the organization's teams
  • Previous access and permissions for the organization's repositories
  • Stars for organization repositories
  • Issue assignments in the organization
  • Repository subscriptions (notification settings for watching, not watching, or ignoring a repository's activity)

Reinstating a former member of your organization on GitHub

If a user was removed from your organization because you required members and outside collaborators to enable 2FA, you can send an invitation to reinstate a user's privileges and access to the organization before they have enabled two-factor authentication, but they must enable 2FA before they can accept your invitation to rejoin the organization.

  1. In the upper-right corner of GitHub.com, select your profile photo, then click Your organizations.

    Screenshot of the dropdown menu under @octocat's profile picture. "Your organizations" is outlined in dark orange.

  2. Click the name of your organization.

  3. Under your organization name, click People.

    Screenshot of the horizontal navigation bar for an organization. A tab, labeled with a person icon and "People," is outlined in dark orange.

  4. Click Invite member.

  5. Type the username of the person you want to reinstate and click Invite.

  6. Select whether to restore that person's previous privileges in the organization or clear their previous privileges and set new access permissions, then click Invite and reinstate or Invite and start fresh.

  7. If you cleared the previous privileges for a former organization member, choose a role for the user, and optionally add them to some teams, then click Send invitation.

  8. The invited person will receive an email inviting them to the organization. They will need to accept the invitation before becoming a member of the organization. You can edit or cancel an invitation any time before the user accepts.