What happens to Airtable accounts when the owner dies

It depends on existing access and on the plan. A current collaborator can be set to Owner of the workspace, which carries all of its bases and interfaces. On an Enterprise Scale or Business plan, an account admin can open the admin panel, click the Workspaces tab, and grant Owner permissions to an active collaborator; Airtable also states that Enterprise admins can transfer ownership of bases previously owned by now-deactivated users. On a Free or Team workspace with no surviving owner there is no published route, because Airtable states its Support team is unable to add or remove workspace owners for privacy and security reasons. Nobody should sign in with the deceased person's credentials to work around that.

A surviving collaborator who has access under their own login opens each view, clicks the view name in the toolbar, and chooses Download CSV; the file includes the records and the attachment filenames and URLs. Airtable states it will "ensure that download URLs stay active for at least 2 hours after receiving them" and recommends downloading any attachments from the links in the exported CSV before those links expire, so save attached files promptly. For larger or automated extraction, that collaborator's personal access token can read records through the Airtable Web API.

Airtable bills per workspace rather than per account, but the payment method does not change automatically. Airtable states that "the credit card used for that workspace's billing will continue to be charged, even after a complete workspace ownership transfer," and recommends coordinating with the new owner to update the payment method as part of the handoff. Airtable also says that where a billing method is attached to a workspace you can no longer manage because you do not hold owner permissions, you can contact Airtable Support for help and it may be able to assist — which is the published opening for an estate trying to stop charges on the deceased's card.

The records persist, but live integrations can break. Airtable states that a native automation's failure notifications "default to sending to the workspace's deactivated Owner until a new collaborator toggles the automation off and the back on again," that external or integrated automations "fail when an Owner's account is deactivated," and that "any synced tables created by a now-deactivated Owner will stop updating" while "the base and workflow schema remain intact." A new owner reconnects a native sync by reactivating it, and may need to rebuild external automations or replace the account used in their trigger and action steps.

Airtable publishes no estate document checklist. A written request that identifies the deceased account holder's name and account email, names the workspaces and bases involved and the plan they sit on, and encloses a death certificate together with the estate authority document (for example, Letters Testamentary or Letters of Administration) supplies what a custodian typically asks for to establish that the requester acts for the estate. Airtable publishes no phone number and no estates intake form; the Terms of Service give legal@airtable.com as the contact address, and the in-product "Message support" route starts inside a signed-in account, which an estate should not use.