What happens to Notion accounts when the owner dies

Notion defines a dormant account as a free user account inactive for five (5) years, measured as failing to log in and failing to create or edit content in any workspace. Once an account is identified as dormant, Notion emails the account owner stating that the dormant account and any dormant workspace will be terminated and deleted in thirty days unless there is activity within those thirty days. A workspace is deemed dormant if all of its owners have dormant user accounts. Notion states it will not delete accounts that are managed by an organization, currently associated with a paid workspace (Enterprise, Business, Student, or Plus), or owners of a multi-user workspace.

Only on the Enterprise Plan, and only inside a 30-day window. An Enterprise workspace owner can reassign a deprovisioned user's private pages to another current member through Settings, Members, the Recently left users tab, or through the Content Transfer API. Notion sets four conditions: the user is no longer in the workspace, they had private pages, those pages were not already reassigned, and they were part of the workspace fewer than 30 days ago. The pages then appear nested under a new top-level private page in the destination user's sidebar. On Free, Plus, and Business plans there is no admin-level mechanism for a departed member's private pages.

Notion Sites are published from pages that live inside a workspace, and Notion states that deleting a workspace deletes all of the content inside it. A site can also be taken off the web deliberately from the page's Share menu, Publish tab, Unpublish. Notion states that once a published page is permanently deleted its slug cannot be reused. There is no standalone export of a Notion Site carrying its styling, custom domain, or SEO settings, so the underlying pages should be exported as HTML or PDF before anything is deleted. Notion does not publish an explicit statement about how quickly a published site stops serving once its workspace is deleted.

Notion states in its account-deletion article that it keeps database backups allowing it to restore a snapshot of content from the past 30 days if needed, and directs people to message support in-app or email team@makenotion.com; it describes this as something it may be able to do rather than a guarantee, and states that 30 days after the date of deletion the account and content are permanently lost. Section 15 of the Personal Use Terms puts the same period in binding form for a Personal Workspace: content becomes immediately inaccessible on a deletion request and is deleted from Notion's servers after 30 days. Separately, pages in Trash are kept 30 days by default, and Enterprise workspace owners can set the Trash and deleted-page retention period anywhere between one day and 10 years.

Integration tokens are scoped to a workspace, so an integration keeps working while the workspace exists and its bot user remains. If the workspace is deleted, whether through dormancy, a manual deletion, or an account closure, the tokens tied to it stop working and anything built on them stops. Notion's Enterprise Content Transfer API is itself an internal integration with a Transfer content capability, which is another reason an executor should know which integrations exist before anything is deleted rather than after.