Software · guide

How to turn off screen time, and the code that is not your code

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 23 September 2026 · 9 min read

Almost everybody searching how to turn off screen time already knows where the switch is. They are stuck one step earlier, at a four-digit box, typing a number that ought to work and does not. The reason is a sentence Apple puts at the top of its own page and almost no guide repeats.

Once that is clear the rest follows, and it splits into two situations with two entirely different answers. Which one you are in is not about the phone — it is about whose Apple Account set the code.

The second of those is the one that costs people afternoons. A parent picks up the child’s phone, goes to Settings, taps Screen Time, and finds a screen that asks for a code rather than offering to change it. Nothing is broken and nothing has been forgotten: on a Family Sharing account the control lives on the organiser’s phone, and the child’s device is deliberately not the place where limits can be lifted.

Worth knowing before you set one, rather than after: when you create the code for yourself the menu item is not called what you expect. It is Lock Screen Time Settings. And immediately afterwards Apple offers Screen Time Passcode Recovery — the step that ties the code to your Apple Account and makes the paragraph above possible. Skipping it is the difference between a forgotten code being an inconvenience and being permanent.

A word about the phrasing in the search itself. Searching how to turn off screen time on iphone without password is asking for a way past a control somebody set on purpose, and the honest answer is the one above rather than a trick: if the account is yours, the recovery runs through your Apple Account; if it is not, it runs through the person whose it is. There is no third door, and the pages offering one are selling software that erases the phone.

Two more details that explain otherwise baffling behaviour. If Share Across Devices is on, Apple says the Screen Time passcode “automatically updates on those devices if you reset it” — so changing it in one place changes it everywhere, which is convenient and occasionally alarming. And for settings to sync properly across a Family Sharing group, Apple’s instruction is to update every device to the latest software before turning Screen Time on or changing it, not after.

One thing in this area deserves more attention than it gets, because it is the difference between a forgotten code and a wiped phone, and it is offered only at the moment the code is created. Apple: “After setting a passcode for yourself, you can also set up Screen Time Passcode Recovery. If you set up this feature, you can use your Apple Account to reset your Screen Time passcode if you ever forget it.” The note sits under Create a Screen Time passcode and nowhere else in the article: the offer arrives in the same screen as the four digits, and does not come back.

A note on who this applies to at all, because Apple has just changed it. Reread on 16 September 2026, the passcode article describes the passcode as being for yourself alone — “a passcode that you must enter before changing Screen Time settings you selected for yourself” — and sends the other case somewhere else: “If you want to set up Screen Time or parental control features for your child, see Apple Devices for Kids and Families.” The age that used to be written into that sentence has gone out of it with the rest, and this guide will not carry a number its source has stopped publishing. What Apple does still say about a child’s code is who resets it: with Family Sharing, “the Family Sharing organizer or a parent/guardian needs to reset the Screen Time passcode on their own device, not the child’s device”.

The other family system draws the same line in the same place. Google’s Family Link puts the limits on the child’s device and the controls in the parent’s account, which is exactly why a code set by somebody else cannot be removed from the device it governs. Both systems are built on the same assumption: the person who set the limit is not the person holding the phone. If you are the one holding it and the code is not yours, the route out is the account that set it, on any platform.

The guides below take it four ways: the code itself, turning the limits off when you are entitled to, setting it up properly in the first place, and the related restrictions that are governed from the same screen and show up elsewhere on this site.

Not covered here. It will not tell you how to bypass a Screen Time passcode. The feature exists to stop exactly that, and the tools sold against this question either erase the device or do not work.

It will not suggest that a restriction on a phone you do not own is yours to remove. If somebody set it, the route runs through them.

And it will not treat Screen Time as an enemy. The blocking half of it is genuinely useful, and it is the reason more than one guide on this site points back here. What holds instead is simple: the distinction between the two passcodes and the recovery arrangement are Apple’s own.