How to protect your Costco membership while you are alive
There is no way to name a beneficiary or successor on a Costco account. While the account holder is alive, Costco Wholesale allows authorized users, transferring the account and gift purchases.
Costco Wholesale's terms provide a path for Costco membership after a death, and what the account holder sets up in advance decides how smoothly that path runs. There is no way to name a beneficiary or successor on a Costco account. While the account holder is alive, Costco Wholesale allows authorized users, transferring the account and gift purchases.
How to protect your Costco membership
Naming who acts after a death
- Designation
There is no beneficiary designation on a membership. A Personal Administrator can renew or upgrade it but cannot remove the Primary Member, so the role is not a substitute for the Deceased Primary process.1
What Costco Wholesale Corporation's terms say about sharing and transfers4
- Family plans and household sharing
A Primary Member, and an Affiliate Member on a Business account, receives one free additional Household Card for a designated household member who is 16 or older and living at the same address.1, 2
The household member has their photo taken and added to their card when they collect it at the membership counter, and can shop independently.2
A Gold Star Membership carries exactly two people: "one Primary Member and one free household member who is over 16 and lives at the same address."3
Members may bring up to two guests per visit, but only members may purchase.1
- Authorized users and delegates
The Primary Member must authorize cardholder changes, including additions or deletions, and is responsible for the membership.1
The Primary Member can designate a current Costco member as a Personal Administrator (or Business Administrator), authorized to change the address and phone number, update communication preferences, and upgrade or renew the membership.1
- Gifting and purchases for others
Members and non-members alike may spend Costco Shop Cards, including toward a membership, at any Costco in the U.S., Canada or Puerto Rico and on Costco.com, and only members may purchase and reload them. A digital Shop Card can be handed to someone else by forwarding the email.4
- Fees
The annual fees are $65 for Gold Star and $130 for Executive, which is the $65 membership fee plus a $65 upgrade fee.5
Should you save your passwords for your family?
Some people store account passwords so a family member can sign in later. The practice has three practical limits:
- Two-factor authentication often blocks it. Most accounts require a second factor — a code sent to a phone, an authenticator app, a passkey, or a physical key. A saved password alone frequently does not grant access, and the recovery codes that would are easy to lose or let go stale.
- It usually conflicts with the platform's terms. Most operators prohibit account sharing and signing in as another person, including after a death. Stored credentials are not the operator's recognized access path, and using them can violate the terms of service.
- Operators provide other paths. Where an operator offers a designation tool — Apple's Legacy Contact, Google's Inactive Account Manager, a beneficiary designation — that mechanism grants access the operator recognizes. A password manager's own emergency-access or legacy feature passes credentials through a controlled process. Digital assets named in a will or trust give a fiduciary authority under each state's Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA).
Sources
Data sourced from Costco Wholesale Corporation primary sources (12 pages reviewed). How we research.
Costco customer support
Costco Member Services Center (Membership and Warehouse)
Phone
Hours
Website
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