Estate planning as a Udemy account holder

Udemy is an online learning marketplace with two sides. Instructors publish courses and earn a revenue share that Udemy pays out through PayPal, Payoneer, Tipalti, or U.S. direct deposit. Students buy individual courses under a personal, non-transferable license, and some hold Udemy credits, a stored balance applied to future course purchases. Udemy's Terms of Use state that when a user dies, the account is closed. The estate-relevant assets are an instructor's unpaid revenue, the account's purchase and payout records, and any Udemy credits.

After a Udemy account holder dies, Udemy, Inc. may transfer revenue to a designated recipient, but this is handled case by case. The outcome depends on the documentation provided and is entirely at Udemy, Inc.'s discretion.

What happens at death

Udemy's Terms of Use (last updated July 31, 2026) state in the Accounts section: "In the event of the death of a user, the account of that user will be closed." The same section says a user "may not transfer your account to someone else or use someone else's account," and section 12.8 says a user "may not assign or transfer these Terms (or the rights and licenses granted under them)." What that closure means differs by side of the marketplace. For a student, purchased courses are a "limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable license," and Udemy's closure article states that closing an account means losing access to all enrolled courses, so the course library ends with the account. For an instructor, the Instructor Terms (last updated July 29, 2026) say that when an account is deleted, Udemy will "use commercially reasonable efforts to make any remaining scheduled payments that are owed to you before deleting your account," and that students who enrolled may keep access to the courses. The Instructor Terms also say that if Udemy "cannot settle funds into your payment account" after the period set by unclaimed property laws, it may submit those funds to the appropriate government authority. Udemy publishes no deceased-user form or estate procedure describing how a payout owed to a deceased instructor is redirected to an estate, so that part is handled case by case through Udemy Support.

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