How to protect your Canva account while you are alive

Canva offers no way to name who acts on an account after a death. A team owner can nominate a new owner only while alive, because the nomination cannot be started after the owner dies.¹

A Canva team has a single owner, who controls billing, team deletion, bulk data downloads and ownership transfer. The Terms of Use state, "Only the Team Owner may assign a new Team Owner" (sec. 8).^{1, 2}

Admins can manage members, content, Brand Kits and permissions but cannot transfer team ownership.¹

On Canva Teams, Business or Enterprise, an admin can transfer a departing member's folders, designs, templates, videos, audio, media uploads and shared content to another member when removing them, but not if the member leaves on their own.³

Transferred content lands in a folder named "From [person's name]" and keeps its sharing permissions; comments and activity history do not come across. Ownership transfer is on by default, but a team created before June 1, 2026 enables it under Settings > Controls first.³

Team and organization Brand Kits are created and managed by admins and brand designers and live with the team, so they go when the team goes. Personal Brand Kits, where an admin has enabled them, are private to the person who made them.⁴

The owner nominates a new owner from among existing team members with an active Canva account; the nominee has 30 days to accept, and the owner stays the owner until then. A nomination can be withdrawn before it is accepted.¹

An ownership transfer does not work if the owner is the only person left on the team, and the team payment method cannot be changed after it. The previous owner becomes an admin, and the plan, benefits and eligibility do not change.¹

Personal accounts have no transfer mechanism, and the Terms of Use bar assigning the terms or any rights under them without Canva's written consent (sec. 16(g)).²

Canva's bulk download packages uploaded images, videos, fonts and designs, with the personal data on file, into a ZIP from Account Settings. It runs on desktop only, takes 24 to 72 hours, and the download link is valid for 14 days.⁵

On a team, only the team owner can export team content, and requesting the export blocks account deletion until it finishes.⁵

Canva exports to JPG, PNG, SVG, PDF (Standard, Print and Compressed), PPTX, DOCX, CSV, XLSX, GIF and MP4. PPTX and DOCX downloads may look different in PowerPoint or Word, may need the fonts installed, and do not carry animations or embedded video.⁶

Some download options (quality and file-size limits, scale, compression, CMYK color profiles, and transparent PNGs and SVGs) are limited to paid plans, and a PDF export of a cropped image still contains the original uncropped image.⁶