What happens to your online accounts when you die

Somebody dies, and within a week their family discovers that the hard part is not the funeral. It is the phone nobody can unlock, the bank that will not talk to them, the photographs on a laptop behind a password, the small business whose domain renewal is on a card that has been cancelled. None of this is in the will. Most of it is not written down anywhere at all.

This is a fairly new problem. Fifty years ago, the things a person left behind were physical, and physical things are findable: a filing cabinet, a shoebox, a safe with a key in a drawer. Today a great deal of what matters is behind a login, and a login is designed to keep people out.

What actually happens to an account

There is no single answer, because every provider has its own policy. But the broad shape is consistent, and it is worth knowing before you plan around it.

Most accounts sit there

Email, cloud storage, subscriptions, forums, shopping accounts. Nothing happens. The provider does not know, and nobody tells them. Subscriptions keep charging until the card expires or the bank closes it. Files stay exactly where they were, behind a password nobody has.

Some can be memorialised or closed

The larger platforms have a formal process. Facebook can memorialise an account or delete it. Google has Inactive Account Manager, which will hand nominated contacts some of your data after a period of inactivity that you choose. Apple has Legacy Contacts. These are genuinely useful and almost nobody sets them up, because doing so requires sitting down on an ordinary Tuesday and thinking about your own death.

Almost none of them will let a relative in

This is the part that surprises people. A grieving spouse with a death certificate, a marriage certificate and photo ID will usually still be refused access to the contents of an account. Providers are bound by their own terms, by privacy law, and by the reasonable fear of handing someone’s private correspondence to the wrong person. What they can often do is close the account. What they will rarely do is open it.

So the practical position is this: an account you have not made arrangements for is, for most purposes, gone. Not deleted, just permanently shut.

What that means in practice

A short list of things that are routinely lost, taken from the sort of thing families actually write to support teams about:

• Photographs. Twenty years of them, in a cloud account nobody can open.
• Money. Not usually large amounts, but accounts nobody knew existed: an old savings account, a trading account, a crypto wallet, a PayPal balance, a pension from a job in 2009.
• Access to the practical machinery of a life. The energy account, the insurance, the mortgage portal, the council tax login, the vet, the storage unit.
• A business. Domain names, hosting, the payment processor, the accounting software. A one-person company can become unrecoverable within weeks.
• Anything only you knew. Where the spare key is. Which neighbour has the cat. What the plan actually was.

Why a will does not solve it

A will is the right tool for who gets what. It is the wrong tool for how to reach it, for three reasons.

It becomes public. In most jurisdictions a will that goes through probate can be read by anyone who asks. Putting passwords in a will means publishing them.

It goes stale. You change your password every year or two. You are not going to visit a solicitor every time you do.

It is slow. Probate takes months. The domain renewal does not.

What a will does well is decide ownership. What your family also needs is a separate, current, private set of instructions: where things are and how to get into them. Lawyers sometimes call this a letter of wishes or a letter of instruction, and it sits alongside a will rather than inside it. We have a guide to writing one.

The four options, honestly compared

Write it down on paper

A sheet of paper in a fireproof box, or with your will at a solicitor’s office. Cheap, simple, and genuinely better than nothing. Its weakness is that it goes out of date the moment you change a password, and paper in a house is exposed to fire, flood, burglary and helpful relatives having a tidy-up.

A password manager with an emergency contact

Most of the good password managers have an emergency access feature: a nominated person requests access, you get a notice, and if you do not decline within a waiting period they are let in. This is a strong option and if you already use a password manager you should turn it on today.

Its limits: it covers what is in the manager and nothing else. It does not carry documents, it does not carry a message, and it will not tell your brother which neighbour has the spare key. We have written more on getting passwords to the right person.

The platforms’ own tools

Google Inactive Account Manager, Apple Legacy Contact, Facebook legacy contact. Free, official, and worth setting up. But each one covers one company. You will need to configure them separately, they cover only their own data, and none of them can deliver a message you wrote.

A deadman switch

A service that sends a message and files to a named person if you stop checking in. You write the instructions once, attach whatever documents matter, set a timer, and confirm you are fine at whatever interval suits you. If the confirmations stop, the message goes.

Its advantage over the others is that it is a single place holding everything, it is private until it fires, and it delivers to someone who does not need an account or any technical knowledge. Its disadvantage is that it depends on you remembering to check in, which is a real commitment. We wrote about how the mechanism works in what a dead man’s switch actually is.

A version of this you can do this week

Perfect is the enemy of done here, and the families who end up stuck are almost always the ones whose relative had every intention of sorting it out.

1. Make a list of what would actually be hard to reach. Not every account. The ten or fifteen that matter: your main email, your bank, your phone, your photographs, your work, anything nobody else knows about.
2. Write down where each one is and how to get into it. Including the second factor, because a password without the authenticator is not access.
3. Write two paragraphs of context. Who to call first. What you want done. Where the physical documents are.
4. Put it somewhere that will reach one specific person and nowhere else until it needs to.
5. Tell that person it exists. This step is skipped more than any other, and it is the one that makes all the rest work.
6. Put a recurring reminder in your calendar to reread it once a year.

The honest summary

Your accounts will not be handed to your family. In almost every case they will simply close, quietly, and everything inside them becomes unreachable. That is not a policy anyone is going to change, and it is not something you can appeal after the fact.

What you can do is make the list, write the instructions, and arrange for them to arrive. It takes an evening. The alternative is that somebody who loves you spends six months on hold with a call centre.

My Signal Vault exists for the last step of that list: a written message and encrypted files, held privately, delivered to one person you name if you stop checking in. The free plan gives you one vault and 100MB of encrypted storage, which is enough for the instructions and the documents that matter, and it costs nothing. If you would rather see how the machinery works first, the help centre explains it without asking you to sign up.