A passkey lets you sign in with your fingerprint, face, device PIN, or password manager instead of typing a password. It's optional, you can add more than one, and your password keeps working either way.

Why bother?

• It's faster. No password to remember or type.
• It can't be phished. A passkey is tied to retirementfigures.com by your browser. A lookalike site can't ask for it and can't be given it by mistake - which is not true of a password, however careful you are.
• There's no shared secret. The private half never leaves your device. We only store the public half, which is useless on its own.

Add a passkey

Go to Control Center and open the Passkeys card. Choose Add passkey, give it a name you'll recognize later, and confirm with your password. Your browser or device then takes over - Windows Hello, Face ID, Touch ID, your device PIN, or a password manager like 1Password, iCloud Keychain or Google Password Manager.

We ask for your password first on purpose. A passkey is a permanent new way into your account, so somebody who found a browser you'd left signed in shouldn't be able to add one quietly. You'll also get an email whenever a passkey is added, removed or renamed - that email is the point, so don't ignore one you weren't expecting.

Sign in with it

On the sign-in screen, choose Sign in with a passkey. There's no need to type your email first: your device offers the passkeys it holds for this site, and you confirm with your fingerprint, face or PIN. If you'd rather use your email and password, that's still there below.

"Synced across your devices" vs "This device only"

Each passkey in the list says which it is, and the difference matters:

• Synced across your devices - your password manager keeps a copy, so it works on your other devices too, and it survives losing this one.
• This device only - it exists on this device alone. If the device goes, so does the passkey.

We only report what your device tells us. We can't see which device a passkey is on, which is why you name them yourself - a name like "Work laptop" will mean more to you later than anything we could guess.

If you lose a device

Nothing is lost. Sign in with your email and password, or with another passkey, then remove the one you no longer want from the Passkeys card. You can add as many as you like, and having two - your phone and your laptop, say - means losing either one is a non-event.

Your password still works

Adding a passkey doesn't remove your password, and we don't currently offer a passkey-only account. That's deliberate: your password is what gets you back in if every passkey is gone. Worth being clear about the trade-off - because password sign-in stays available, somebody who obtained your password could still use it, so a passkey makes signing in safer and easier rather than making your password irrelevant. Use a strong, unique password either way.

If you don't see the Passkeys card

It's shown to signed-in accounts only, and it needs a browser that supports passkeys. Most current browsers do; a few older ones and some in-app browsers don't, and there the card will tell you so.