What happens to my LinkedIn profile when I die?

LinkedIn offers two different, mutually exclusive paths, and which one applies depends on who's asking and what they can prove. Per LinkedIn's own help page: "If you're authorized to act on behalf of a deceased member, and have the required information and documentation, you can request to close their account." Anyone without that authorization — a colleague, a friend, a distant relative — can instead "report a member as deceased and we will memorialize the profile." Source

Closure deletes the account; LinkedIn states this "can take up to 30 days to completely delete the data from the system" once approved. To request it, LinkedIn requires acceptable legal documentation — "Letters of Administration issued by a court," "Letters of Testamentary issued by a court," "Letters of Representation issued by a court," or another court order naming the requestor as authorized representative — plus the member's full name, their profile URL, your relationship to them, their email, the date of death, and a link to an obituary or news article confirming it.

Memorialization requires none of that: anyone can report the death, and LinkedIn adds a memorial marker without deleting anything or needing legal paperwork. This is the path for people who aren't the executor but want the profile to stop showing up as active.

Neither path gives anyone login access — LinkedIn's process is exclusively about closing or memorializing, never handing over credentials.

What we could not verify: what a memorialized LinkedIn profile actually looks like to visitors (what changes, what stays the same) — the source page covers the request process, not the resulting visual state, in the level of detail Meta documents for Facebook.

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