Planning ahead for your LinkedIn accounts

LinkedIn Corporation (Microsoft) accounts cannot be transferred and have no beneficiary option — here is what you can do while the account is active

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Verified Jul 2026

LinkedIn Corporation (Microsoft) 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 LinkedIn accounts

6 lifetime planning steps for your LinkedIn accounts:

1
Keep at least two admins on any LinkedIn Page you manage. If the sole admin dies, the Page is left unmanaged, and reclaiming it depends on a current employee verifying a company email address and requesting admin access.
2
Download your own LinkedIn data periodically while you are signed in (Settings and Privacy, then Data Privacy, then Get a copy of your data). LinkedIn's data export is available only to the signed-in account holder, and LinkedIn publishes no export path for an executor, so a local archive of connections, messages, and articles is the only copy your family will have.
3
Record in your estate inventory that the LinkedIn account exists and which email address it uses. LinkedIn's deceased-member forms ask for the profile URL, the account email, and the date of passing, so an executor who has those can act without guessing.
4
Decide, in writing, whether you want the profile memorialized or closed, and tell your executor. Memorialization keeps your published articles, recommendations, and endorsements visible; closure deletes the account data within about 30 days and cannot be reversed.
5
Note any Premium or Sales Navigator subscription and where it is billed. LinkedIn cancels its own subscriptions on memorialization, but a subscription purchased through Apple keeps billing until it is cancelled through Apple.
6
Treat connections, endorsements, and recommendations as non-transferable. They are tied to the individual account and cannot be moved to another person's profile, so anything of professional value (an article, a portfolio piece, a reference) should also live somewhere outside LinkedIn.

Family sharing

LinkedIn accounts are non-transferable. There is no family sharing, delegate access, legacy contact, or account succession mechanism, and the User Agreement (2.2) requires members "not share or transfer your account or any part of it (e.g., sell or transfer the personal data of others by transferring your connections)." The only outcomes after death are memorialization or closure. LinkedIn Pages are the one continuity mechanism: a Page can carry several admins, so if the deceased was one of multiple admins the remaining admins keep access. If the deceased was the sole admin, the Page is treated as not actively managed, and a current employee who lists the organization in their profile Experience section, verifies their workplace with a current company email address, and follows the Page can request admin access; LinkedIn states that where a Page has no active admins "you may be granted access automatically."

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

Download your own data while you are signed in (Settings and Privacy, then Data Privacy, then Get a copy of your data), because LinkedIn offers no export path to an executor. Record in your estate inventory that the account exists, the profile URL, and the email address it uses, since the deceased-member forms ask for exactly that. State whether you want the profile memorialized or closed. Keep at least two admins on any LinkedIn Page you manage. And note where any Premium subscription is billed, since an Apple-purchased subscription is the one LinkedIn will not cancel for you.

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

LinkedIn does not offer beneficiary designations, so there is no program-level mechanism for directing accounts to a specific person at death.

SimplyTrustSimplyTrust Editorial·

Sources

Data sourced from LinkedIn Corporation (Microsoft) primary sources (7 pages reviewed). How we research.