Planning ahead for your Google accounts

Steps you can take now to control who receives Google LLC (Alphabet Inc.) accounts

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Verified Jul 2026

Google LLC (Alphabet Inc.) does not guarantee transfer of accounts after death. Lifetime planning provides options for managing accounts and controlling who has access to them.

How to protect your Google accounts

Here are 8 steps to protect and manage your Google accounts while the account is active:

1
Set up Inactive Account Manager at https://myaccount.google.com/inactive. This is the single most important step. Designate up to 10 trusted contacts, select which services to share with each contact (Gmail, Drive, Photos, YouTube, and more), set the inactivity timeout (3, 6, 12, or 18 months), and optionally enable account auto-deletion after the timeout.
2
Provide a current mobile phone number for each trusted contact in Inactive Account Manager. Google verifies each contact's identity by SMS before allowing data downloads. A stale or missing number blocks the release.
3
Download personal data periodically with Google Takeout (https://takeout.google.com). Takeout requires the account holder to be signed in, so it must be run during life. Export Gmail, Drive, Photos, Calendar, YouTube, and any other service in use as local backups the estate can rely on regardless of what Google does with the account after death.
4
For YouTube channels with monetization: document AdSense payment settings for the executor. AdSense continues paying automatically after death; redirecting payments to the estate requires legal documentation submitted to Google Legal Support (https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/165678).
5
For Google Workspace: ensure more than one Super Admin exists on the domain. If the sole Super Admin dies, regaining admin access requires domain verification recovery, which is substantially harder than handing off between two existing admins.
6
For Google One storage shared with Google Family: understand that if the subscription lapses, family members lose shared storage and revert to the free 15 GB tier. Files are not deleted, but adding new files is blocked once they exceed quota.
7
For Google Photos: photos saved only inside shared albums (not the owner's library) may be lost when the owner's account is deleted. Save meaningful shared photos to each viewer's own library.
8
Record the Google Account email address, whether Inactive Account Manager is configured, the list of designated trusted contacts, and which Google services hold critical data in the estate digital asset inventory. Note that Google Play purchases are non-transferable licenses and will be lost when the account closes -- consider sharing important content via Google Family or Play Family Library during life.

Family sharing

Google accounts themselves are non-transferable and cannot be signed over to another person. Three separate sharing-adjacent features exist: (1) Google Family (up to 6 members) shares a Google One storage plan and Google Play Family Library purchases while the sharing account remains active -- content access ends if the sharing account is closed; each member's files stay in their own account. (2) Google Workspace Super Admins can archive, delete, or transfer Drive, Calendar, and Looker Studio data from one user to another; this is the only path for full data transfer and exists only on Workspace business accounts, not personal Google Accounts. (3) Inactive Account Manager (myaccount.google.com/inactive) is the single most important lifetime planning feature: the account holder pre-designates up to 10 trusted contacts who receive a download link for selected services (Gmail, Drive, Photos, YouTube, and more) after a user-configured inactivity period of 3, 6, 12, or 18 months. Each contact must verify via SMS to a mobile phone number provided by the account holder. The account holder can also set Inactive Account Manager to auto-delete the account after the inactivity period.

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).

Recording that a Google account exists, alongside other accounts, gives a fiduciary the information needed to reach the operator through its official process.

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Sources

Data sourced from Google LLC (Alphabet Inc.) primary sources (11 pages reviewed). How we research.