Digital Wellness

What happens to your online accounts when you die

October 16, 2026

14 min read

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Google, Apple and Meta will hand your family your photos. None of them will hand over the list of everywhere else you had an account.

Quick answer. When you die, most of your online accounts simply keep existing. They keep your data, keep any saved card and, in some cases, keep billing it. A few platforms let you name someone in advance: Google's Inactive Account Manager, Apple's Legacy Contact and Facebook's legacy contact are the main ones. Without that setup, your family usually needs a death certificate, proof of their relationship to you and sometimes a court order. Even with it, they get access to the data on one platform. Nobody gets your passwords, and nobody gets a list of the hundreds of other accounts you opened over the years. That list is the part you have to make yourself.

Last updated October 2026. Current as of 16 October 2026.

Why your family can't just log in, even if they know the password
What Google, Apple, Microsoft and Meta actually do, and the inactivity clocks that run on their own
The accounts that no legacy setting covers, which is most of them
What to set up this week, while it's still your call
What to do if you're the one handling a parent's or partner's accounts now

The estate nobody inventories

Estate planning has a well-worn shape. You write a will, name an executor, list the bank accounts and the house and the pension. Then someone dies and the family discovers a second estate that nobody wrote down.

We call it the quiet estate. It's every account you ever opened: the streaming services, the airline profile, the photo printing site from 2014, the shop you made an account with to get 10 percent off. Yorba's 2024 State of Clutter report put the average member at 246 online accounts. Most people, asked to list theirs, get nowhere near that number while they're alive.

Now imagine someone else trying to list yours.

The quiet estate isn't worth much on paper, which is why wills ignore it. But it holds saved cards and home addresses on servers nobody in your family knows exist. It doesn't announce itself. It waits for a renewal date, a breach notice or a scammer who notices an account nobody is watching anymore.

We should be honest about our angle here. Yorba exists to find forgotten accounts, so of course we think the forgotten accounts are the important part. The legacy tools the big platforms built are genuinely good, and you should set them up. Our argument is narrower: they solve a different problem from the one most families actually hit.

Why can't my family just log in to my accounts?

Because the password usually isn't enough, and using it may not be allowed. Most accounts now send a sign-in code to a phone that may be locked or already cancelled. And some companies won't engage without a judge involved: Microsoft says it must be served with a valid subpoena or court order before it will even consider releasing anything from a deceased person's Outlook.com or OneDrive account.

The terms you agreed to matter too. In the US, the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, a model law that many states have adopted, sets an order of priority. A direction you give through a company's own online tool comes first and overrides your will. Your will or other estate documents come next. The company's terms of service apply only if you left neither.

There's a catch for email specifically. Under that law, an executor can generally see a catalogue of your messages, meaning who wrote and when, but not what they said, unless you consented in writing or through an online tool.

In Europe the picture is patchier. Recital 27 of the GDPR says the regulation doesn't apply to the personal data of people who have died, and leaves it to each country to set its own rules. Some countries have, so where you live changes what your family can ask for.

What happens to Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook accounts when you die?

Each of the big four has a different answer, and two of them have a clock running whether or not anyone calls.

Google. Inactive Account Manager lets you pick what happens after your account goes quiet. Google's own security blog describes it as up to 10 people to notify, an inactivity period of 3, 6, 12 or 18 months, and an option to delete everything afterwards. If you never set it up, Google says it reserves the right to delete an account that has been inactive across Google for at least two years. Families can also file a request to close the account or, in some cases, receive content from it. Google is explicit that it won't hand over passwords, and that choosing closure first rules out a later request for the contents.

Apple. A Legacy Contact gets an access key while you're alive. After your death, they send Apple that key and a death certificate. Apple then issues them a special account with access for three years, after which the data is gone. They can see iCloud Photos, Mail, Messages, Notes, iCloud Drive files, health data and device backups. Apple's list of what they can't access is the interesting part: purchased films, music and books, subscriptions, payment details and everything in iCloud Keychain, which is where your saved usernames and passwords live.

Microsoft. Microsoft's rules are the strictest of the four. If nobody has the password, Microsoft's bereavement page says Outlook.com and OneDrive are frozen after one year of inactivity, with email and files deleted shortly after. The account itself expires after two years.

Facebook. You can choose a legacy contact or ask for your account to be deleted when you die. A legacy contact can pin a post, update the profile picture, request removal of the account and download what you shared if you allowed it. They can't log in or read your messages. If nobody set anything up, the account can still be memorialized once Facebook is told about the death, and then no one can log into it at all.

Read those four together and a pattern shows up. Apple gives your family your photos but deliberately withholds your passwords. Google and Microsoft both quietly delete an account that has been inactive for two years. That account is very often the email inbox, and the inbox is the one place where a record of every other account you opened was kept.

Which accounts aren't covered by any legacy setting?

Almost all of them. A handful of companies offer a way to name an heir. The other couple of hundred accounts in a typical quiet estate offer a contact form, if you can find it, and a support agent who needs proof of who you are.

That's the part the legacy guides tend to skip, so it's worth slowing down on what those accounts actually are.

Subscriptions. A paid subscription doesn't know you've died. It renews until someone cancels it or the card behind it stops working. Annual plans are the sneaky ones, because a charge that appears once a year can go unnoticed for a long time on a statement someone else is now reading.

Accounts holding a saved card or address. Shops, delivery apps, travel sites and marketplaces often keep a card and a home address on file. Each one is a place that information can leak from in a future breach, long after anyone remembers the account existed.

Accounts with your face or your words in them. Old forums, dating apps, review sites, photo hosts. These are the accounts a family is most likely to want closed and least likely to know about.

Accounts you made for a single purchase. The 10 percent off signup, the one-time event ticket, the guest checkout that turned into an account anyway. Individually they're trivial. Together they're the bulk of the 246.

Here's the uncomfortable question we kept asking ourselves while writing this. If someone you love died tomorrow, could you name ten of their accounts beyond the obvious ones? Plenty of us would struggle to name ten of our own.

How do I plan what happens to my online accounts after I die?

Start with the free tools, then deal with the list nobody else can make for you. None of this needs a lawyer, though it's worth mentioning to one if you're already writing a will.

Turn on the legacy settings you're eligible for. That means Google's Inactive Account Manager, an Apple Legacy Contact and a Facebook legacy contact. Send your Apple access key to the person you chose and check they actually received it, because without it their request gets much harder.
Give someone a way into your password manager. Apple's Legacy Contact explicitly excludes iCloud Keychain, so if that's where your passwords live, they die with you. Several dedicated password managers have an emergency access feature. Bitwarden's, for example, lets you choose a trusted contact, decide whether they can view or take over your vault, and set a wait time of at least a day during which you can refuse the request.
Write down the quiet estate. Your inbox is the most complete record you have, because almost every account sent a welcome email, a receipt or a password reset at some point. Search it for phrases like "welcome to", "confirm your email" and "your receipt", and note every sender that turns out to be an account.
Close what you don't need. Every account you delete now is one your family never has to track down. Yorba's free Delete Desk has deletion instructions for more than 10,000 services.
Leave instructions where your executor will look. Say which accounts should be closed, which kept and who should handle them. If you're in the US and want your executor to be able to read your email, say so in writing, because the default under the model law is the catalogue only.

One caution on step 3. A written list of accounts, especially one with passwords on it, is a target in its own right. Keep it in your password manager or with your estate documents, not in a note on your phone.

What should I do with a loved one's accounts after they die?

Protect the inbox first and close things second. The order matters more than speed, because the most common mistake is closing the one account that would have told you about all the others.

Don't close their main email account yet. Google warns that once you ask it to close an account, it can't process a later request for the contents. Microsoft freezes an unused Outlook.com inbox after a year. If you have lawful access, that clock is your real deadline.
Gather the paperwork once. You'll be asked for the same things repeatedly: several copies of the death certificate, proof of your relationship and, for executors, the court document that appoints you. Scan them so you can upload them in minutes.
Check for legacy settings. Ask whether they named an Apple Legacy Contact or set up Google's Inactive Account Manager. Tell Facebook about the death so the account can be memorialized or removed, rather than left open to anyone who guesses the password.
Stop the money leaving. Go through at least twelve months of card and bank statements, not one, so annual renewals show up. Cancel each subscription with the company where you can. If a company won't cooperate, closing the card at the bank stops the charges that depend on it.
Map the rest from the paper trail. Receipts, renewal notices and "we noticed a sign-in" emails all point to accounts. So do the apps on their phone and the saved logins in their browser, if you can lawfully see them.
Close, keep or memorialize, one service at a time. Most companies have a bereavement or deceased-user page in their help centre. Delete Desk can save you the search for the deletion steps.

If you're thinking of simply signing in with their password, talk to whoever is handling the estate first. It's often the quickest route, and it can also put you on the wrong side of the company's terms or, depending on where you live, the law.

Where Yorba fits

Yorba is most useful while you're alive, and we'd rather say that plainly than dress it up as an estate tool.

Connect a Google or Microsoft inbox and Yorba reads the header data of your email, not the content, to find the signup confirmations, receipts and password resets that show an account exists. It covers two years of history on the first scan, then re-scans weekly. The result is the written-down quiet estate from step 3, built for you, including the accounts you'd forgotten. The free plan covers one inbox and gives you deletion instructions for each account through Delete Desk.

Premium, at $60 a year, connects unlimited inboxes, finds recurring subscriptions and cancels the ones you choose. It also sends account deletion requests on your behalf, which is the slow, document-heavy part most people abandon.

What we don't do matters just as much here. Yorba doesn't offer a service for settling someone else's accounts after they die, and it can't get anyone into an account they don't already lawfully control. It doesn't connect Yahoo or iCloud mailboxes, and accounts older than the first two years of scanned history may still need the manual search above.

So our honest pitch is a smaller estate. The fewer accounts you leave behind, the less there is for anyone to untangle. That's the same reason we think deleting accounts you no longer use is worth doing for its own sake, long before anyone is thinking about wills.

Frequently asked questions

What happens to my online accounts when I die? Most stay exactly as they are, with your data and any saved card still on file. A few platforms act after a period of inactivity: Google and Microsoft can delete personal accounts that have been inactive for two years, and Microsoft freezes Outlook.com and OneDrive after one. Everything else waits for someone to close it.

Can my family get my passwords? Not from the companies. Google says it won't provide passwords or login details, and Apple's Legacy Contact excludes iCloud Keychain. If you want someone to have your passwords, the reliable route is emergency access in a password manager.

What is a digital legacy contact? It's a person you name, inside a company's own settings, to receive or manage your account after you die. Apple and Facebook both use the term. Google's equivalent is the list of trusted contacts in Inactive Account Manager.

Does a will cover my online accounts? It can, but in US states that adopted the revised fiduciary access law, a direction you give through a company's own online tool overrides your will for that account. Use both, and make sure they agree.

Do subscriptions stop when someone dies? No. They renew until someone cancels them or the payment card stops working. Check at least a year of statements so annual renewals aren't missed.

How long do I have to deal with a loved one's email account? It depends on the provider. Microsoft freezes an inactive Outlook.com inbox after one year. Google's general policy allows deletion after two years of inactivity. Don't request closure before you've saved anything you need, since Google can't release contents after an account is closed.

Does GDPR protect a deceased person's data? No. Recital 27 says the GDPR doesn't apply to the personal data of people who have died and leaves the rules to each EU country.