Estate planning as a Instacart Shopper account holder

Instacart Shopper is the earner side of Instacart: an independent contractor who shops for and delivers grocery orders. Shoppers earn per batch — batch pay plus promotions plus 100% of customer tips — and are paid by weekly direct deposit (Wednesday to Friday for the prior week) with an Instant Cashout option that releases earnings to a bank account or debit card for a fee. The estate-relevant items are the unpaid earnings sitting in the account for completed Services, the earnings and payment records the estate needs for the decedent's final self-employment tax return, and the live contractor account itself. This is the shopper account, not the consumer Instacart+ subscription, which is handled separately.

When a Instacart Shopper account holder dies, their earnings may be transferred to a designated person at Maplebear Inc. (dba Instacart)'s sole discretion. A transfer is not guaranteed, and satisfactory documentation is required before processing any request.

What happens at death

Instacart publishes no deceased-shopper or estate-succession process for a shopper account. Neither the Instacart Shopper Application Terms and Conditions nor the U.S. Independent Contractor Agreement nor the Shopper and Shopper Applicant Privacy Policy contains a death, deceased, decedent, or estate clause. The closest provision is Section 11 of the Independent Contractor Agreement, "Successors and Assigns," which binds the agreement on the parties' respective heirs, successors and permitted assigns while providing that the contractor may not assign rights or delegate duties without Instacart's prior written consent. The Shopper Application Terms separately grant only a "non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable" license to the Shopper App and state that the shopper may not rent, lease, sell, transfer, redistribute, or sublicense it. There is no beneficiary designation and no self-service account transfer, so an heir cannot step into the account. What remains for the estate is money owed for completed Services — Section 3.1 of the Agreement commits Instacart to "transmit to you payment for completed Services within 30 days of performance" — together with the earnings and payment records behind it. Because Instacart has no published procedure and reviews such requests individually, the policy is classified as case-by-case.