How to protect your Meta Ads account while you are alive
There is no way to name a beneficiary or successor on a Meta Ads account. While the account holder is alive, Meta Platforms allows authorized users.
Meta Platforms decides requests about a Meta Ads account after a death case by case, so nothing in its terms promises a survivor anything; what the account holder sets up in advance is what holds. There is no way to name a beneficiary or successor on a Meta Ads account. While the account holder is alive, Meta Platforms allows authorized users.
How to protect your Meta Ads accounts
Naming who acts after a death
- Designation
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.1
What Meta Platforms, Inc.'s terms say about sharing and transfers2
- Transferring the account or registration
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.1, 2
- Workspace roles and admin access
Someone with full control of a business portfolio can add people and set their access. Full control, formerly the business admin role, covers portfolio settings, people, tools and business assets; partial access is limited to the assets and tasks a person is assigned.3
Finance access is an advanced option layered on either level, letting a person view or manage transactions, invoices, account spend and payment methods. Temporary access can be granted for a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 75 days, then is revoked automatically.3
In Ads Manager an ad account has three roles, Admin, Advertiser and Analyst, and only an Admin can edit the payment method or manage who else has access.4
Receipts, ad charges and payment history sit in Billing and payments, and pulling them needs full control of the ad account, or Admin permissions where the ad account's permissions are managed in Ads Manager.5, 6
Sources6
- 1.Meta Terms of Service, effective January 1, 2025
- 2.Meta Commercial Terms, effective March 6, 2024
- 3.Business portfolio permissions (Meta Business Help Center)
- 4.Ad account roles in Ads Manager (Meta Business Help Center)
- 5.Receipts (Meta Business Help Center)
- 6.Ad charges and payment history (Meta Business Help Center)
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).
Sources
Data sourced from Meta Platforms, Inc. primary sources (16 pages reviewed). How we research.
Meta Ads customer support
Meta Business Help Center
Website
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