What happens to an AWS account when someone dies

A standalone account is closed only by signing in to the AWS Management Console as the root user: not as an IAM user or role, and not through the AWS CLI, SDKs or API. A management account follows the same rule and closes only once every member account shows as closed.¹

AWS Support will not close a standalone account on the estate's behalf. Member-account closures are limited to 20% or 250 accounts, to a maximum of 1,000, within a rolling 30-day period, and a closed member account counts toward the account quota until the post-closure period ends.¹

A member account in an organization running in All Features mode can be closed centrally by authorized IAM users or roles in the management or delegated administrator account, without its root credentials; in Consolidated Billing mode it is closed by its own root user.²

Closing an account serves as notice of termination of the AWS Customer Agreement and starts a 90-day post-closure period, during which the account can be signed in to only to view past billing, reach account settings or contact AWS Support.¹

To reopen within the post-closure period, AWS Support must be contacted as soon as possible and AWS must receive full payment of any outstanding balance within 30 days of the closure date; charges for remaining services restart on reopening.¹

During the post-closure period, content and AWS services are reachable only by reopening the account. After 90 days the account is permanently closed, its account ID can never be reused, and AWS deletes the remaining content and resources, with CloudTrail trails the documented exception.¹

For the 30 days after the termination date, the Customer Agreement says AWS will not remove the customer's content as a result of the termination, and will allow it to be retrieved only if all amounts due have been paid.³

Running infrastructure keeps incurring charges until the account is closed. A final bill arrives the month after closure for usage before it, and the customer remains responsible for all fees and charges incurred through the termination date.^{1, 3}

Closing the account does not cancel AWS Marketplace subscriptions, and invoices for Reserved Instances and Savings Plans continue after closure until they expire.¹

Route 53 domains on a closed account get daily emails for up to five days and are then suspended; Amazon Registrar domains are deleted after 30 days, and Gandi-registered domains are released to Gandi.⁴

Where the root user email address uses a domain registered through Route 53 in the same account, closing the account suspends the domain and breaks email to the root user: "Without email, you cannot recover the account, and without the account, you cannot reinstate the domain."⁴

A closed account's email address and account alias cannot be reused on another AWS account, and a hardware TOTP token device cannot be associated with another user after permanent closure.¹

Under section 11.1 of the AWS Customer Agreement, any assignment or transfer without AWS's prior written consent is void, and the agreement binds permitted successors and assigns, so a change of ownership to an estate or successor is a request AWS decides.³

Section 2.4 of the AWS Customer Agreement states that AWS log-in credentials and private keys "are for your internal use only and you will not sell, transfer or sublicense them to any other entity or person."³

For a lost root user email address, AWS's root-user troubleshooting guidance points to recovering control of the email domain or mailbox, to corporate IT administrators where the address is on a company mail system, or to its general Contact us page.^{5, 6}

The deceased's consumer Amazon account; it does not reach AWS⁷