Planning ahead for your Costco membership
Lifetime transfer options and steps to take now for Costco Wholesale Corporation membership
Costco Member Services (Deceased Primary — Primary Cardholder change in the event of a loss)
Costco Wholesale, Attn: Member Services, 800 Lake Drive, Issaquah, WA 98027
Costco Wholesale Corporation offers a process for transferring Costco membership after death. Lifetime planning provides additional options for how membership are used and who has access to them.
How to protect your Costco membership
Here are 5 steps to protect and manage your Costco membership while the account is active:
Family 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 lives at the same address. The household member has their own photo taken on their card and can shop independently. The Primary Member must authorize cardholder changes, including additions and deletions, and is responsible for the membership; cards remain the property of Costco. Beyond the household card, members may bring up to two guests per visit, but only members may purchase. Costco Shop Cards are a separate way to share value: they can be given to anyone, used by non-members, and (for digital Shop Cards) forwarded by email to another person.
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).
Frequently asked questions
Record your membership number, membership type, and renewal date where your executor can find them. If you want the membership to continue without interruption, add a household member 16 or older at your address as a free Household Cardholder. Note any unredeemed Executive 2% reward certificate, since it can only be redeemed while the membership is active and is subtracted from any cancellation refund, and keep any Costco Shop Cards with their numbers and PINs, since those never expire and can be used by anyone.
No. Costco offers no beneficiary designation of any kind. The free Household Card is simply a second card issued to one designated household member who is 16 or older and lives at the same address, and the Primary Member must authorize cardholder changes. It is the closest thing to continuity planning Costco has: if the household member already holds a card, they can keep shopping while Costco's "Deceased Primary" process moves the Primary Cardholder into their name. Cards remain the property of Costco throughout.
Listing the Costco account in an estate inventory identifies it for a fiduciary, who works through the operator's official channels to manage or close it.
Costco does not offer beneficiary designations, so there is no program-level mechanism for directing membership to a specific person at death.
Sources
Data sourced from Costco Wholesale Corporation primary sources (9 pages reviewed). How we research.
Costco Member Services (Deceased Primary — Primary Cardholder change in the event of a loss)
Costco Wholesale, Attn: Member Services, 800 Lake Drive, Issaquah, WA 98027
