Three systems decide what happens to an account. None of them checks with the other two, and none of them learns about a death on its own.
The company running the account has its own rules, and it wrote every one of them for living customers. Your state adds a second layer. Federal privacy law adds a third, and the statute behind it says nothing at all about probate. Sorting out which of those layers governs a given account is work for the lawyer handling the estate.
The order you work in matters more than the speed, because two or three of these steps can’t be undone. The copying comes first. Saving the photos and files comes before the paperwork, and long before any cancellation.
Nobody hands out a prize for finishing quickly. Most jobs after a death can wait a month without getting worse, but the photos and old messages sitting in cloud storage can’t.
Nobody at these companies can send a password. Google says plainly that it cannot provide passwords or other login details, and Apple builds a separate legacy account instead. Access, where it arrives at all, usually means a copy of the data or a limited role on the account. Plan around that from the start.
Everything on this page assumes that nobody in your family holds a working password to the accounts. That assumption fits most households. Where somebody in the family does hold one, the routes get shorter, and the ordering advice below still holds.
State law ranks the instructions, and the company still picks the method
Lawmakers finished the model law in 2015. By July 28, 2026, 47 states and the District of Columbia had enacted a version of it.
The total depends on how you count. Other sources say 48, because they fold Delaware’s older act into the same total.
California enacted its version in 2016 and extended it to conservators and agents on January 1, 2025. Old maps still get this wrong. Sources that list California as a state without such a law are repeating an error from a map drawn around 2017. Checking where your own state stands today is a job for the estate’s lawyer, not for a website.
Louisiana and Massachusetts have enacted neither act, and Delaware keeps a broader 2014-generation law of its own. The differences between states are real. The law ranks three sources of instruction, and a setting the person left inside a platform outranks the will. That ranking holds where the platform lets the setting change at any time, which is how these tools normally work.
Where no such setting exists, a will, a trust, or a power of attorney governs, and the platform’s terms come last. The law also splits an account in two. One half is the catalogue, which records who the person messaged, when, and at what address.
The other half is the content itself. A documented executor gets the catalogue by default, while the content needs the person’s recorded consent or a court order.
The base package is a written request, a certified death certificate, letters of appointment, and proof that the person agreed. Sending that package starts a clock. The act’s published text sets 60 days for the company to answer. The company keeps the right to demand a court order anyway, and it may send a copy instead of access.
A copy can stand in for login access, and no platform examined for this site releases login credentials. Passwords aren’t part of the deal. Whether any of this reaches the messages themselves is a question for the lawyer handling the estate.
Copy the files before you cancel anything
Four large storage services publish an inactivity clock. Google removes an account after two years without a sign-in, and Apple’s iCloud terms set that clock at one year.
Microsoft publishes a two-year window, and Dropbox gives free accounts 12 months while leaving paid ones alone. Estate paperwork does nothing to those clocks. Only use of the account stops them, which is exactly what a family without the password cannot do. Treat the shortest window among all the accounts as the working deadline for the whole job.
The trap that catches families has nothing to do with those clocks, and everything to do with the storage bill. Say the executor cancels the monthly plan. Storage then drops below what the photo library needs, and Apple removes deleted photos at once instead of holding them 30 days.
OneDrive has an over-quota rule too. A Microsoft-moderated support resolution puts the deletion at more than 12 months, and the policy page carries no committed notice period.
The sequence looks responsible from the outside, because stopping a charge nobody recognizes is exactly what the job asks for. The order is what fails. Export first, and cancel second, and the same rule covers a phone contract, a domain name, and a web-hosting plan. Each of those carries something that disappears the moment the payment stops.
Delaying the storage cancellation until the export finishes protects the part of the estate nobody can rebuild. Every other cancellation can wait too. Where a bill looks like it can’t wait, the lawyer handling the estate can settle the order.
The paperwork opens almost every door
Two documents unlock most of this work. You’ll order several certified death certificates at a time, because nearly every process here asks for one.
The second document is the court paper naming the executor, and probate lawyers call it letters testamentary. Platforms ask for it by that name. Reporting a death and exercising estate authority are separate acts, and they call for different paper. Anyone can report a death with an obituary, while court-issued papers are what move an account or close it.
The split shows up plainly at LinkedIn, which accepts court-issued letters and turns away the documents families reach for first. Wills and powers of attorney get refused. The paperwork page lists what each large platform asks for, and what it won’t take.
Google’s list is short. Its request process wants government identification plus a death certificate, and an American court order for anything inside the messages.
Apple runs on a different footing, because its legacy contact route needs an access key created at setup. The company holds only an encrypted packet. Apple’s own security guide says the beneficiary holds the decryption key, so nobody inside the company can waive that step. A death certificate on its own doesn’t replace the key.
Incapacity works differently, because an agent under a durable power of attorney files a lighter package. The living person can still consent. That authority ends at death, which is why an agent must stop acting and tell the institutions at that point.
Money keeps moving until somebody stops it
No company watches the death records. Charges keep leaving the account until somebody cancels them or the card behind them stops working.
You’ll build the list from bank statements, and 12 months of them catches every charge that repeats once a year. That floor is arithmetic, not anybody’s rule. The probate handbook checklist hosted by the Fairfax County Commissioner of Accounts tells executors to pull three years. Mail forwarding through the Postal Service catches renewal notices that statements miss, and it wants in-person proof of executor authority.
Cancel the monthly subscriptions first, then put the annual renewals on a calendar, because those land months later. Bereavement phone lines remain the reliable route. Stopping the payments without losing the data is its own job, and this site gives it a page.
One federal shortcut vanished in 2025. The Eighth Circuit vacated the Federal Trade Commission’s click-to-cancel rule on July 8, 2025, on procedural grounds.
The commission has begun new rulemaking, and state automatic-renewal laws still stand. As of July 28, 2026, no uniform federal one-click cancellation right exists. Then there’s the debt. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau says collectors break the law by telling a family it owes the money personally.
Its answer on debt runs short. The bureau says the estate pays the debts. It ties personal liability for survivors to co-signing, joint accounts, or community-property rules, and the estate’s lawyer can say which applies.
A few things expire on their own schedule
Airline miles run on short windows. American Airlines terms effective March 1, 2026 say the miles are not property of the member or the estate.
The airline offers a one-time discretionary credit with documentation, and the terms set a one-year window for the request. Hilton and IHG set one-year windows too. Delta’s terms provide for forfeiture, while Marriott permits a transfer to one named recipient. Travel reporting describes front-line practice as more generous than the written terms, though the contract stays the enforceable baseline.
Domain names ignore probate entirely, because they expire on non-payment like any other bill. Renewal dates belong on your triage list. GoDaddy’s estate process asks for four items submitted together, and ICANN locks a domain against transfer for 60 days after a registrant change.
Kindle libraries end at death. Amazon licenses that content rather than selling it, with no assignment to anyone else written into the terms.
Custodial cryptocurrency follows the probate path, slowly. Coinbase’s own page blocked automated checking, so this description is verified at one remove. The company freezes an account on notice of death, then wants a certified death certificate, probate documents, and photo identification. The executor files from their own Coinbase account, the balance moves into a new one, and even smooth cases reportedly take weeks.
Self-custody holdings are the one class with no recovery path at all. No issuer can restore access. Where the amounts matter, the estate’s lawyer can bring in counsel who handles this work, and that referral is worth making early.