How To Change Your Primary Facebook Email Address

I just received a handful of emails from different individuals who all wanted to know how to change their primary Facebook email address. While it could be all the same person sending me emails from all of their accounts, I'd say it is still worth an article. When you sign up on Facebook you have to enter an email address. This becomes your primary email address on Facebook.

The primary email is used for all communications, for instance notifications that someone messaged you or that a user logged in with your account from another computer. If you do not have access to your primary email anymore you will not receive those notifications and communication, unless you change it on Facebook.

Changing Your Facebook Email Address

You can only change your email address on Facebook if you can still log in on Facebook. Sign in as usual and locate the Account link at the top right corner of the screen. Click on Account and then on Account Setting under the Context Menu.

Locate Email under the Settings tab (which is the default tab) and click the Change link on the right of the preference. Your primary email address is listed on that screen.

A menu looking similar to the on shown on the screenshot below should be displayed on the same page when you click on the change button.

All email addresses connected to this Facebook account are listed there. If the other email address that you want to use on Facebook is already listed, select it and click Change Contact Email.

This makes the selected email address your primary email on Facebook.

If the email is not there, enter it under New Contact Email and click the Add New Email button afterwards.

You are asked to enter your Facebook password to confirm the change. If you enter the right password, a confirmation email is send to the new email address. It contains a confirmation link that you need to click on to confirm that you have access to the email address. If clicking does not work copy and paste the link in the email to your web browser and activate it that way.

Facebook sends a second email to the current primary email address. This contains information that a new email address is about to be added to the account. This email contains a link to cancel the operation, so that the new email address is not added to Facebook.

New emails that you add and confirm are not added as the primary email by default. You need to go back to Settings > Email to select the new email address under Contact Email. A click on Change Contact Email opens the password prompt again where you need to enter the Facebook password again to confirm the change.

The selected email should now be displayed as the primary email on Facebook. You can use the Remove links next to all emails but the primary email to delete it from the account. You need to confirm the removal of email addresses with your password.

Update: Facebook has modified the general account settings page and thus the process to change your primary email on the social networking site.

The first thing that you need to understand is that you need to have at least two email addresses added to your account before you can switch the primary address. Once you have at least two, you see a selection menu on the general account settings page that allows you to switch to another email. It is this email that will receive all the notifications that you receive from Facebook.

Please note that you can use all emails as the log in username, and if you do not have access to one of the emails, I'd suggest you click on remove next to it to delete it from your account.

Update: Things have changed over at Facebook a bit. You now need to load the following web page on Facebook. Here you need to enter your password for the site again before you are presented with a menu where you can change your primary Facebook email address to another registered address.

You can add another email address here as well in case you only have one registered with Facebook. If you want, you can also remove email addresses from the account, but not the primary for obvious reasons. To switch, simply click on make primary here.

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