What Happens to Your Online Accounts When You Die?

Online accounts don't simply pass to your family. Each company has its own rules, and without a plan your family may be locked out of your photos, your email and the phone that receives your sign-in codes. Several of the biggest services let you decide now what happens later. Setting them up takes about an hour.

Set up the tools that already exist

• Apple: Legacy Contact (iPhone with iOS 15.2 or later, or a Mac with macOS 12.1 or later). Choose one or more people. After your death, a legacy contact with the access key and a death certificate can ask Apple for access to data stored in your Apple Account, such as photos, messages, notes and files. It does not include passwords stored in your keychain or purchased movies, music and books.
• Google: Inactive Account Manager. Decide how long your account can be inactive (from 3 to 18 months) before Google acts, choose up to 10 people to be notified and, if you wish, allowed to download the data you select, and choose whether the account is then deleted. Separately, Google may delete personal accounts that have not been used for two years.
• Facebook: legacy contact. Choose someone to look after your account if it is memorialized, or ask for it to be deleted after your death. A legacy contact can manage the profile, such as pinning a tribute post, but cannot log in or read your messages.
• Instagram: family members can ask for an account to be memorialized or removed by sending proof of the death. There is no legacy contact to set up in advance, so write down what you would want.
• Password managers: some offer an emergency-access feature that shares your vault with a trusted person after a waiting period (Bitwarden does, on a paid plan). Others, including the password managers built into Apple and Google devices, do not, so check yours. Either way, record where your emergency instructions are kept, never the master password itself.

Your phone is the key to everything

Two-step sign-in codes often go to your phone, so a family that cannot unlock it may be locked out of email, banking and every account that sends a code. Record where the phone's unlock instructions and any backup codes are kept, not the passcode itself, and make sure someone you trust knows where to look.

What the law says

In the US, most states have adopted the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA). Under it, a choice you make in a company's own online tool, such as those above, generally takes priority over your will, so setting the tools up matters. Even with access, an executor usually gets a list of your communications rather than their content unless you consented. Elsewhere the rules differ, and the company's own tool is still the most reliable way to say what you want.

Write down a digital list

• Every account that matters: email, social media, cloud storage, shopping, subscriptions and payment apps.
• The username or email for each, and what should happen to it: close it, memorialize it, or download the photos first.
• Which legacy contacts and emergency-access settings you have set up, and who you named.
• Where your password manager's emergency instructions are kept, and where any cryptocurrency recovery phrase is stored. Never the passwords or the phrase themselves: without the recovery phrase, cryptocurrency can be lost for good.

Sources

• Apple: How to add a Legacy Contact for your Apple Account
• Google: About Inactive Account Manager
• Google: Inactive account policy
• Facebook: What is a legacy contact
• Instagram: Report a deceased person's account
• Bitwarden: Emergency access
• Uniform Law Commission: Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, Revised

Last reviewed 2026-10-31. General information, not legal, tax, financial or medical advice.