How do I recover my Government Gateway user ID?

Check which credential you have actually lost before you start. A Government Gateway user ID is a string of up to 12 digits HMRC issued when you first enrolled for online services, and GOV.UK describes it in exactly those terms on the sign-in page. It is not a GOV.UK One Login, which uses your email address as the identifier and has its own recovery route. GOV.UK says One Login will over time replace every other way of signing in to services on GOV.UK, including Government Gateway, but that it does not yet work with all of them — so both credentials are in circulation and the recovery paths do not overlap.

The self-service route is the only one that returns the number itself. Start at gov.uk/log-in-register-hmrc-online-services and follow the 'problems signing in' link, which states that you can recover or reset your sign-in details if you have lost them, and that you will be told how when you try to sign in. That leads to HMRC's account recovery service, which asks for an email address associated with the user ID. Supply one it recognises and the ID is sent to that mailbox. This is the whole online route — there is no version of it that works from your National Insurance number or your UTR alone.

If no email address is held, the service stops. The recovery page says in terms that you cannot recover your sign-in details online until an email address has been associated with the account, and sends you to find the correct helpline for the service you were trying to reach. There is no workaround, so do not keep resubmitting the form: the account you are trying to reach will lock you out first. GOV.UK's signing-in help page says the account unlocks after two hours and that helpdesk advisers cannot lift the lock, which means phoning during those two hours achieves nothing.

The helpline that handles credentials is HMRC's online services helpdesk on 0300 200 3600, or +44 161 930 8445 from outside the UK, open Monday to Friday 8am to 6pm and closed on bank holidays. GOV.UK describes its scope as technical problems with HMRC systems — error messages, identity verification, sign-in problems and access code difficulties — and says explicitly not to use it for tax queries or for VAT online services, which have their own lines. Expect security questions. GOV.UK warns that if your personal details and address are not current in your tax account you may fail the check, so update them where you can before you ring.

Two adjacent failures get mistaken for a lost user ID. The first is a forgotten password, which runs through the same 'problems signing in' route but is a reset rather than a recovery. The second is an access code going to a phone you no longer hold: HMRC can send the code by text message, voice call or authenticator app, and the fix is to sign in with the user ID and password you do have, select 'You can get help' when the code is requested, and follow the steps. Neither of those gets you the user ID back, and neither is a reason to keep retrying the recovery form.

Timing matters more than it looks. Self Assessment filing and payment for the previous tax year are both due by 31 January, so a January lockout that needs a phone call to fix is a lockout with a penalty attached to it. Recover the user ID out of season if you can, and once you have it, attach a live email address to the account so the self-service route works next time. If a health condition or disability makes the phone route difficult, GOV.UK says you can ask any HMRC helpline to put you through to its extra support team.