Estate planning as a Figma account holder

Figma is a collaborative design platform for interface design, prototyping, and developer handoff. A Figma account can hold design files (.fig), prototypes, FigJam whiteboards (.jam), Figma Slides presentations (.deck), component libraries and design systems, published Community files, plugins and widgets, and Dev Mode resources. The native formats are proprietary and open only in Figma products, so the estate value is the design work itself plus whatever team, folder, or file ownership the person held. Figma publishes no bereavement or deceased-user process of any kind. What it does publish in detail is what happens to teams, folders, files, and drafts when an account is deleted, and how ownership moves between accounts -- and those rules, not an estate channel, are what determine whether a designer's work survives.

When a Figma account holder dies, their accounts may be transferred to a designated person at Figma, Inc.'s sole discretion. A transfer is not guaranteed, and satisfactory documentation is required before processing any request.

Figma allows members to transfer accounts to other program members during their lifetime, typically for a fee. This is a practical way to share value without a formal estate transfer.

What happens at death

Figma publishes no estate, bereavement, or deceased-account process. A scan of all 886 English help-center articles on 2026-09-16 returned zero occurrences of "deceased," "decedent," "death," "passed away," "executor," "personal representative," "probate," or "next of kin," against positive controls of 595 for "design" and 260 for "account." The Terms of Service grant a "limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable right" to access the Services (section 1.1), and section 9.7 provides that "These Terms (and your access to any of the Services) are not assignable or transferable by Customer without Figma's prior written consent." On termination, section 8.2(b) provides that Figma "will make all Customer Content then held by Figma available to you for electronic retrieval for a period of 30 days, but thereafter Figma may delete any stored Customer Content." What Figma does document precisely is the consequence of an account being deleted without ownership having been transferred first: on Starter and Professional plans a team with other members has ownership reassigned automatically (to an admin, then a can-edit member, then a can-view member) and a team with no other members is deleted; on Organization and Enterprise plans the team becomes ownerless and an organization or workspace admin can claim it; owned folders become ownerless and a team owner or admin can claim them; owned files inside teams or folders become ownerless and cannot be claimed, though anyone with access keeps it. Files in drafts are the exposed case -- on Starter they become inaccessible, and on Professional, Organization, and Enterprise they are collected into a folder only admins can reach. Figma also warns that deleting an account deletes the files in that account's drafts regardless of who owns them.

Frequently asked questions