How to delete your Pinterest account permanently

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

Your pins were mostly other people's images. Deleting your account removes your boards, but the original pins stay on Pinterest under whoever posted them. What you lose is your curation — years of organising — not the images themselves.

Step 0: Request Your Pinterest Data Archive

Pinterest's export is thin compared with other platforms: it gives you your data, not a browsable copy of your boards. If a board represents real work — a wedding, a renovation, a research collection — screenshot it or copy the source links out before deleting. There is no way to reconstruct it afterwards.

Request the export from Settings → Privacy and data → Request your data.

How to Cancel the Pinterest Deletion Grace Period

You only get 7 days, and logging in cancels it. Pinterest permanently deletes your account and personal data 7 days after you request it — one of the shortest windows anywhere. And during those 7 days, simply logging in reactivates the account. If you want to check whether it worked, visit pinterest.com/yourusername in a logged-out browser rather than signing in.

Delete your Pinterest account on desktop

1. Log in, click the options icon, then Settings.
2. Choose Account management in the left sidebar.
3. Select Delete account and follow the prompts.
4. Check your email and confirm — the deletion does not complete until you do.

Delete Pinterest in the app

1. Tap your profile picture — top left on a personal account, bottom right on a business one.
2. On a business account, tap the ⋯ icon.
3. Tap Account management.
4. Scroll down and tap Delete your data and account.
5. Complete the prompts, then confirm via email.

The email confirmation catches people out. If you never open it, the account is not deleted.

Running a business account? Settle any outstanding balance first — Pinterest charges unpaid bills to your payment method on file.

Deleting a relative's account after a death. Pinterest is one of the few platforms that documents this: they will delete a deceased person's account if a family member contacts them with verification such as an obituary or death certificate. They will not hand over login details or any personal information from the account, only remove it.

Deactivate instead — and what the words mean

Pinterest has both. Deactivating is the reversible one and deleting is permanent. There is no separate option to close, cancel or remove a Pinterest account — those all mean one of these two.

Deactivation hides your profile, boards and pins from everyone else while keeping them intact. Your email address and username stay tied to the account, and you can reverse it by logging back in. It is on the same settings screen and is the better choice if you are unsure.

Pinterest notes that users in California must contact Pinterest before reactivating.

What happens to your pins

• Your boards and pins: removed from public view.
• Pins other people saved from you: stay on their boards.
• Images you uploaded yourself: removed, but anything already re-pinned by others persists.
• Comments you left: removed with the account.

Business accounts have an extra step

A Pinterest business account carries advertising and billing that a personal one does not, and closure does not tidy any of it up for you.

• Pause your ad campaigns first. A live campaign is still spending money right up to the moment the account goes.
• Settle the outstanding balance. Pinterest charges unpaid bills to the payment method on file, and closing the account does not cancel the debt.
• Download your analytics if you use Pinterest performance to report to anyone. There is no export of it afterwards.
• Remove the claimed website. If you claimed a domain, unclaim it so a future account can claim it cleanly.

A personal account linked to a business one is a separate account, and closing one does not close the other. Check which you are signed into before you start — the settings path differs between them, which is a decent clue.

Seven days is the shortest window on this site

It is worth pausing on this, because the whole internet has trained people to assume they have a month. Pinterest gives you a week, and the accidental reactivation problem is unusually easy to trigger: the app on a phone you have not thought about will sign you in the moment you open it.

Sign out of Pinterest on every device before you start. Phone, tablet, second browser, the work laptop. A single background login inside those seven days quietly cancels the whole thing, and Pinterest does not tell you that it did.