How to deactivate your Robinhood account

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

Transferring your assets out closes the account by itself. Robinhood states that if you transfer all of your assets to another brokerage, it closes your Robinhood account for you. So the choice is not really "sell up, then close" — moving the positions is one action that does both.

Selling and transferring are not the same thing

Selling your holdings to empty the account is a disposal, and a disposal is what triggers capital gains tax. An in-kind ACATS transfer moves the positions to another broker without selling them, so nothing is realised. If your holdings have risen, the gap between those two routes is real money.

How that is taxed depends on where you live and on your own circumstances, and this is a deletion guide rather than tax advice — if the amounts matter, the question is worth putting to an accountant before you press anything.

What has to be true first

For a self-directed taxable individual account, Robinhood requires that you:

• have closed all your positions;
• have no pending deposits;
• have no upcoming dividends, cash sweep payments or Stock Lending payments — you have to wait for these to pay out;
• are no longer enrolled in Stock Lending or the brokerage cash sweep programme;
• have a $0 balance.

Deactivate the account

1. Select Account (the person icon), then Menu (the three bars) in the app.
2. Open Settings.
3. Choose Deactivate an account.
4. Pick the account and follow the prompts.

Robinhood emails you within about 5 to 7 days to confirm the closure or ask for next steps, and says processing takes 1 to 2 weeks.

What you keep, and what you cannot get back

• Your records stay. Statements, tax documents and trade confirmations remain available in the app after deactivation — you are not racing a deadline to download them.
• Only your primary individual account can be reactivated. Additional self-directed individual accounts cannot be reopened once deactivated.
• Deactivating your primary account costs you IPO Access, and you will not be able to trade futures or crypto.
• Joint and managed accounts cannot be reactivated at all. Robinhood names both, and for joint accounts you will not be eligible to open a new one either.
• Only individual investing accounts can be reactivated by you. Every other account type needs Robinhood Support to do it, so reopening is a request rather than a button.

If you share a joint account, your deactivation reaches into theirs. Robinhood states that deactivating your individual account while you are a co-owner of an active joint investing account may cost you features inside that joint account — Robinhood Gold, Stock Lending, the brokerage cash sweep programme, and the ability to link new bank accounts or debit cards. Worth telling the other person before you do it, since they will notice the account changing without having touched it.

An ACATS transfer, in practice

If you are moving to another broker rather than cashing out, the transfer is initiated at the receiving end — you do not start it from Robinhood. The new broker asks for your Robinhood account number and pulls the positions across.

• Expect it to take several business days, and expect to be unable to trade the positions while they are in flight.
• Robinhood charges a fee for outbound ACATS transfers. Some receiving brokers reimburse it if you ask — worth asking before you start rather than after.
• Not everything transfers. Fractional shares generally cannot move in kind and are typically liquidated instead, which turns part of your "no disposal" transfer into a taxable disposal after all.
• Crypto is separate from securities and does not move on the same rails. Handle it on its own.

Your cost basis is supposed to follow you, but check that it did. Basis information transfers between brokers as a separate, slower process than the shares themselves, and it does not always arrive intact — especially for positions you moved into Robinhood from somewhere else originally. Download your Robinhood tax documents and trade confirmations anyway, and compare the basis your new broker shows against them once the dust settles. Fixing a wrong basis is easy with records and near-impossible without.

Why the money side is not optional reading

Closing a brokerage account is the one deletion on this site that can generate a tax bill by itself. Two decisions do it:

1. Selling to reach a zero balance. Every sale is a disposal, and a portfolio liquidated in a single afternoon to satisfy a closure requirement realises every gain in it at once, in that tax year.
2. Letting fractional shares be liquidated during a transfer, which happens quietly and is easy to miss until the tax form arrives.

Robinhood keeps your statements and tax documents available after deactivation, which is genuinely better than most platforms on this site. That is not a reason to skip downloading them — access depends on being able to log in, and an account you deactivated years ago is exactly the kind you eventually cannot get back into.

Steps checked against Robinhood’s “Deactivate an account” article.