How to delete your LinkedIn account permanently

By Otabek Mamadaliev · Sources last reviewed 24 August 2026 · What this means

Three things stop you closing at all. LinkedIn will not let you close a Basic account while you still hold a Premium membership, a premium account licence, or ownership of a LinkedIn group. Each has to be resolved first — cancel the subscription, release the licence, and either transfer the group to another owner or delete it. The group one catches people out, because a group you started years ago and forgot about will block the whole process with no obvious explanation.

Cancel Premium properly rather than assuming closure ends it. If you subscribed through Apple or Google rather than on LinkedIn, the billing lives with them and has to be cancelled there — confirm it has actually stopped before you close anything.

You get 14 days to reopen — but reopening does not restore everything. LinkedIn states that endorsements and recommendations, pending invitations, the pages and people you followed, and your group memberships are gone for good, even if you reopen inside the 14 days. After 14 days the account cannot be reopened at all.

Close your LinkedIn account

1. Go to the LinkedIn close-account page and sign in.
2. Select a reason for closing, then click Next.
3. Enter your password and click Close account.

The long way round: Me → Settings & Privacy → Account management → Change next to Close account.

To reopen inside the window, log in normally or use the link in the closure email LinkedIn sends you.

Download your data first

LinkedIn holds things that exist nowhere else — your connection list, recommendations you have received, and years of messages. Request the export from Settings & Privacy → Data privacy → Get a copy of your data and wait for the email before closing anything.

The connection list is the part people miss. It is often the only record of professional contacts built over a decade, and it is not recoverable afterwards.

What closing actually removes

• Your profile: stops being visible and drops out of LinkedIn search. Search engines may cache it for a while longer.
• Recommendations you wrote: removed from other people's profiles.
• Your messages: removed from your side; recipients keep their copies.
• Group memberships and followers: gone.
• Recommendations you received: gone, and they cannot be re-issued if you return.
• Your purchase history: no longer accessible. Download any invoices you need for expenses or tax before you close.

If it is Premium you want gone, not the account

LinkedIn lets you cancel Premium and keep a free Basic account. You stay reachable and your connections, profile and message history survive — you simply stop paying. If the bill is what prompted this, do that rather than closing the account and losing a decade of professional contacts.

Cancel Premium before closing either way. If you subscribed through the App Store or Google Play, billing is handled by Apple or Google rather than LinkedIn, so cancel it in your phone's subscription settings and confirm it has stopped.

Hiding is usually the better answer

Most people closing LinkedIn want one of two specific things, and closing the account is a heavy way to get either. Both have a dedicated setting:

• "I do not want to appear in Google results." Turn off public profile visibility under Settings → Visibility. Your profile stops being indexed while your connections and messages stay intact.
• "I do not want my employer to see I am job hunting." Turn off profile-change broadcasts, and set Open To Work to recruiters only. Closing the account is far more conspicuous than either.
• "I am tired of the notifications." Turn them off, or unfollow everyone while staying connected. The network survives, the noise does not.

A closed LinkedIn account is expensive in a way most are not. The connection list is a professional asset built over years and it does not regenerate — reopening inside 14 days does not bring back your recommendations, endorsements, group memberships or the invitations waiting for you. If there is any chance you will job hunt again, this is the deletion on this site most likely to be regretted.

Your profile lingers in search for a while

Closing removes the profile from LinkedIn, but search engines hold cached copies for a period afterwards, and third-party scrapers that copied your profile are not affected at all. Recruitment databases in particular are built by harvesting LinkedIn, and closing your account does nothing to what they already took.

If the goal is specifically to stop being found by name, do the visibility settings first and give them time to take effect in search results — then decide about closing. Doing it the other way round means you never get to check whether the cheaper fix would have worked.