How to delete your Reddit account permanently

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

Reddit is the exception to the 30-day rule. Most platforms hold a deleted account for a month and can restore it. Reddit does not offer that — treat the confirmation button as final.

Your comments do not get deleted

This surprises nearly everyone. Deleting your Reddit account detaches your username from your posts and comments, but the text itself stays exactly where it is, permanently, attributed to [deleted].

If your goal is to remove what you wrote — not just the account — you have to delete the content first, while you can still log in. Once the account is gone you have no way to reach those comments.

1. Go through your profile and delete individual posts and comments you care about, oldest first.
2. Only then delete the account.

Be realistic about what this achieves. Reddit content is mirrored by search engines, archive sites and third-party scrapers within minutes of posting, so deletion removes it from Reddit, not from the internet.

The same is true of your private messages and chats. They are not deleted either. Reddit disassociates them from your username, so the other person keeps the whole conversation — it simply stops showing who they were talking to. If you sent something you would rather did not exist, delete it before the account goes, because afterwards you cannot reach it. Your karma, cake day and avatar do disappear with the profile, and anyone following a direct link to it gets a message saying the account has been deleted.

Delete your Reddit account

1. Go to reddit.com/settings/account while logged in.
2. Scroll to the very bottom of the page.
3. Select Delete account.
4. Enter your username and password, tick the confirmation box, and confirm.

Signed up with a phone number and never set a password? Reddit sends a 6-digit confirmation code instead once you tap Delete account.

Reddit administrators cannot delete an account for you — you have to be able to log in. Behind the scenes, Reddit says the process to remove or anonymise your data commences within 90 days.

Before you go

• Reddit Premium: cancel the subscription separately or billing continues.
• Moderator roles: subreddits where you are the only mod are left unmoderated. Hand over first if the community matters.
• Your username: retired rather than recycled — nobody else gets it, but neither do you.
• Saved posts: not included in an export in any useful form. Copy the links you want to keep.

Request your data before you start deleting

Reddit offers a data export under account settings, and it is worth requesting before you begin removing comments — once a comment is deleted it will not be in the export either.

The export is also the only practical way to get a complete list of what you have posted over the years. Trawling your profile by hand misses things: old comments in dead subreddits, replies buried deep in threads, posts from accounts you have forgotten you merged into your habits. Request it, wait for the email, then work from the file rather than from the site.

Be careful with bulk-delete tools

The popular scripts and browser extensions for mass-deleting Reddit history need access to your account, and handing an unknown tool your credentials is exactly the risk this site exists to warn about. If you use one at all, prefer something open-source that you can read, that authenticates through Reddit's own OAuth screen rather than asking for your password directly, and revoke its access afterwards under app permissions in settings.

Two honest caveats about what these tools achieve:

• Overwriting before deleting is not the protection it is sold as. The common technique of editing every comment to gibberish and then deleting it assumes archives have not already captured the original. For anything more than a few days old, they usually have.
• Rate limits make it slow. A decade of comments takes hours, and a tool that stops halfway leaves you with a half-scrubbed history and no clear record of where it got to.

Be realistic about what deletion achieves

Reddit is one of the most heavily mirrored sites on the internet. Comments are scraped within minutes by archive sites, search engines, screenshot bots and the training pipelines of a dozen companies. Deleting removes content from Reddit; it does not remove it from the places that copied it.

That is not an argument against deleting. It is an argument for knowing what you are buying: closing the account stops future association between your username and what you write, and it removes the convenient version. It does not unpublish anything.

If the real problem is one specific post being findable by name, deleting your whole account may not fix it and a targeted approach usually works better — remove that content, then decide about the account separately.