How to delete your Medium account permanently

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

Export your writing first. Medium provides a full export of your stories under Settings. Deletion is permanent, and for anyone who has written seriously on the platform this archive is the only copy they will have.

Cancel your membership

A paid Medium membership is separate from the account. Cancel it first and confirm billing has stopped — particularly if you subscribed through an app store, where Apple or Google handle the payment rather than Medium.

Delete your Medium account

1. Click your profile picture (top right) and choose Settings.
2. Click Delete account at the bottom of the page.
3. Type delete into the text field — it must be the English word.
4. Press Delete. This is permanent.

On mobile: tap your profile picture on the bottom bar, then Settings (top right), then Account, then Delete account.

There is no bulk delete for stories. If you want your posts gone but the account kept, you have to delete each one by hand — Medium provides no way to remove them all short of deleting the account.

Deactivate instead — but know what it does not do

Medium has a reversible option sitting immediately above the permanent one, on the same screen: profile picture → Settings → Deactivate account at the bottom of the page, then confirm. Signing back in restores everything, with no waiting period and no limit on how often you do it.

Deactivating is not a privacy measure. Medium is unusually direct about this: your profile and all your data disappear from the site, but the account data stays in their database. If your reason for leaving is that you want the data gone rather than hidden, deactivation does not achieve it — only deletion does.

What deletion removes

• All your stories and responses, including drafts.
• Followers and following lists.
• Partner Program earnings — withdraw any pending balance first, it is forfeited otherwise.
• Publications you own — hand these over to another editor first if others write for them, or they go with you.

Stories that were curated or widely shared may persist in search results and third-party archives for some time after deletion.

What the export actually gives you

Medium's export arrives as a zip of HTML files — one per story, drafts included — plus your profile information and lists. It is genuinely complete for the writing itself, which is more than most platforms manage.

What it does not give you is the part writers often want most:

• Responses to your stories are separate posts by other people and are not in your export.
• Your stats — reads, views, referrers — do not export. Screenshot anything you use to pitch.
• Follower lists come out as data rather than as anything you can contact. Medium is not a mailing list and never was, which is the argument for having built one elsewhere.
• Images are referenced rather than always bundled, so check that the pictures actually appear when you open the HTML offline.

Republishing elsewhere is the point of exporting. If you plan to move the writing to your own site, do it before deleting rather than after — having both open lets you check formatting, and canonical links from Medium to your new home are worth setting up while the Medium version still exists.

Custom domains and publications

If you pointed a custom domain at a Medium publication, deleting the account breaks it. Repoint the DNS somewhere else first, so anyone following an old link lands on something rather than nothing.

Publications with other writers deserve more care than a transfer at the last minute. The people who wrote for it have their own stories inside it, and a publication that vanishes takes the presentation of their work with it even though their individual stories survive.

1. Tell the other writers before you do anything.
2. Add another editor as owner so the publication continues.
3. Or remove the stories from the publication first, which returns them to their authors' profiles cleanly rather than orphaning them.

Partner Program earnings need withdrawing before you go, and the payment records go with the account — download anything you will need to declare as income.