How to delete your Slack account

By Otabek Mamadaliev · Sources last reviewed 23 August 2026 · What this means

Slack does not work the way people assume. You do not have one account — you have a separate membership in every workspace you have joined, each tied to your email. There is no master switch, and deactivating one does nothing to the others.

Your messages stay in the workspace

Messages and files you have sent are not deleted when you deactivate. They belong to the workspace, not to you, and they remain readable by admins afterwards. On a work Slack, assume everything you wrote is retained by your employer.

There is one thing you can do about it, and only before you go: if the workspace's settings permit members to delete their own messages, you can remove them yourself first. Once your account is deactivated you have lost the ability to try.

Deactivate your account

1. On a desktop, go to my.slack.com/account for the workspace you want to leave.
2. Scroll down to Deactivate account, then click Deactivate your account.
3. Enter your password and select Confirm Password.
4. Click Yes, deactivate my account.

The account becomes inactive immediately. Repeat for every workspace you belong to.

• Primary owners cannot deactivate. Transfer primary ownership to someone else first.
• Enterprise Grid and guests are the exception. If membership of a workspace is required, or you are a guest, you cannot do it yourself — that is when you ask an owner or admin.
• Apps you installed may be disabled. A workspace owner can manage and re-enable them.

Deactivating is not deleting

An owner or admin can reactivate your account later. Deactivation switches off access; it does not remove you from the workspace's records. To have your profile information permanently deleted, Slack's instruction is to contact that workspace's primary owner after you have deactivated. It is a request to a person, not a button.

Deleting the whole workspace

A different and much larger action — it removes every channel and message for everyone in it, and only the primary owner can do it.

1. From the desktop app, click Admin in the sidebar.
2. Select Workspace settings.
3. Scroll to Delete Workspace and click it.
4. Tick the confirmation box, enter your password, and click Yes, delete my workspace.

Messages and files cannot be retrieved after a workspace is deleted. Slack recommends exporting the workspace data first.

On a work Slack, none of it was ever yours

This is worth being direct about, because people leaving a job frequently misunderstand what deactivating achieves. In a workspace your employer owns:

• The messages are company records. Deactivating your account does not remove them, and admins retain access to everything you wrote in public channels.
• Direct messages are not private from the organisation. Depending on plan and configuration, an employer can export DMs — and where a legal hold or litigation applies, retention overrides deletion entirely.
• Files you uploaded stay uploaded, including anything personal you shared in a DM years ago.
• Your profile remains in the member list as a deactivated account rather than disappearing.

The only window to remove your own messages is before you deactivate, and only if that workspace allows members to delete their own. Many disable it precisely so the record is complete. Check the setting rather than assuming, because after deactivation you have no account to try with.

Leaving, deactivating and being deactivated

Three similar-sounding outcomes that behave differently, and knowing which one you are looking at saves a confusing conversation with IT:

• You deactivate yourself — access ends, the record stays, an admin can switch you back on.
• An admin deactivates you — the usual offboarding path when you leave a job. Identical effect, decided by someone else.
• You ask the primary owner to delete your profile information — the only route that removes your personal details, and it is a request to a human rather than a setting.

For a workspace you joined personally — a community, a hobby project, an old employer's Slack you never left — deactivating yourself is genuinely all you need. It is only on workspaces holding something you would rather did not persist that the profile-deletion request is worth making, and it is worth making politely, because someone has to do it by hand.