Planning ahead for your Meta Ads accounts
Lifetime transfer options and steps to take now for Meta Platforms, Inc. accounts
Meta Business Help Center
Meta Business Support Home (no dedicated deceased-advertiser or estate channel is published; reached by signing in with an account that holds a role on the business portfolio)
Transfer of accounts after death is not guaranteed under Meta Platforms, Inc.'s terms. Lifetime planning offers a more reliable way to manage and share accounts while the account is active.
How to protect your Meta Ads accounts
Here are 7 steps to protect and manage your Meta Ads accounts while the account is active:
Family sharing
An ad account cannot be signed over to another person: the personal Facebook account that owns it is non-transferable under the Meta Terms of Service, and the Commercial Terms bar transferring rights or obligations without Meta's consent. What exists instead is role-based access inside the business portfolio. A business admin can add people and assign them roles — an admin has full control over settings, people, accounts, and tools; a finance editor can edit payment methods and financial details such as transactions, invoices, and account spend; lower roles are limited to assigned assets and tasks. Granting a co-manager or successor an admin role while the owner is alive is the only practical way to make sure someone can pause campaigns and handle billing if the owner becomes unavailable. There is no beneficiary designation on a Meta ad account. The personal Facebook account is planned separately through a Legacy Contact, which does not reach the ad account.
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
Write down the personal Facebook account that owns it, the business portfolio name and ID, every ad account ID, and whether each runs on manual payments (a prepaid balance) or automatic billing (a card or bank on file). Grant a successor an admin or finance role now, because access is not transferred after death and no published Meta process adds an estate to a portfolio. Leave a plain instruction to pause all campaigns immediately. Keep prepaid balances low, since a refund is discretionary. Note which card or bank each ad account bills, so the estate has a lever even without ad-account access.
An inventory listing the Meta Ads account lets a fiduciary identify it and act on it through the operator's official channels.
There is no beneficiary designation option for Meta Ads. This account type does not support naming a recipient the way bank or investment accounts do.
Sources
Data sourced from Meta Platforms, Inc. primary sources (13 pages reviewed). How we research.
Meta Business Help Center
Meta Business Support Home (no dedicated deceased-advertiser or estate channel is published; reached by signing in with an account that holds a role on the business portfolio)
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