Is it legal for my family to log into my accounts after I die?
This is general information, not legal advice — talk to an estate attorney in your state for your specific situation.
In the U.S., the relevant law is the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), a model law drafted by the Uniform Law Commission that individual states then enact (with minor variations) into their own statutes. According to Wikipedia's "Digital inheritance" article, which cites the Uniform Law Commission as its source for adoption data, "as of 2021, 47 states have enacted the RUFADAA" — we could not independently confirm that exact count on the ULC's own site, since uniformlaws.org is fully JavaScript-rendered and returned no retrievable article text to automated fetching in this research pass, so treat the "47 states" figure as secondary-sourced, not primary-confirmed. Source (secondary) One state's actual enactment — Florida's Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, Florida Statutes Chapter 740 — is directly fetchable and confirms the substance of RUFADAA: Source (primary, Florida's enactment)
What RUFADAA actually creates is not a right to log in with someone's password. It creates a three-tier priority system for a formal disclosure request directed at the company (the "custodian"): (1) an online tool the user set up (like Google's Inactive Account Manager or a platform's Legacy Contact) takes priority over everything else if it's modifiable at any time; (2) if no online tool was used, a will, trust, or power of attorney governs; (3) absent either, the company's terms of service control. Florida's statute states this directly: "a direction regarding disclosure using an online tool overrides a contrary direction by the user in a will, trust, power of attorney, or other record." Source, §740.003
Even with the right paperwork, the law only obligates the custodian to disclose — it is a request process aimed at the company, with a certified death certificate, court letters, and often a specific court finding required (Florida's §740.006 lists five separate documentation requirements for full message content, including that disclosure "would not violate 18 U.S.C. ss. 2701 et seq." — the federal Stored Communications Act). It does not authorize simply typing in the deceased's password.
What we could not verify: whether, and to what extent, logging into a deceased person's account directly with their known password (rather than going through the formal RUFADAA request process) could itself expose a family member to liability under a state computer-crime statute. That is a fact-specific legal question this research pass did not chase down a primary source for — ask an attorney.
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