What happens to my Substack when I die?

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Substack splits this into two separate, differently-worded policies depending on whether you're asking about someone's reading/subscriber account or their writer/publication — and the writer side has a notably narrow list of what's possible.

For a reader account, Substack's help center states: "You can request the cancellation of their subscriptions and deletion of their account by visiting the support widget and asking for a human support specialist to assist you with your request," and adds a hard limit: "We can only delete accounts and cancel subscriptions of deceased account holders." Source, retrieved via a Wayback Machine snapshot dated 20 June 2025 — Substack's live help pages returned a bot-protection block to every direct fetch attempt in this pass Substack explicitly rules out several actions even with full documentation: "We cannot take any of the following actions on behalf of a deceased account holder: Change reader profile information / Allow account access / Change payment methods."

For a writer's publication, the limits are stricter still, and one of them is the most consequential fact in this batch for anyone who writes for a living on Substack: "We cannot take any of the following actions on behalf of a deceased publisher: Grant account access to a non-account holder / Change banking information / Grant Stripe access to a non-account holder / Refund subscribers to the publication / Transfer ownership of the account / Make paid only content free / Export publication account data." Source, retrieved via a Wayback Machine snapshot dated 20 June 2025 Substack states plainly it "can only remove content of deceased publishers" — removal, not handoff. That means a Substack newsletter with a paying subscriber base cannot, per this documented policy, be willed to anyone, handed to a co-writer, or even exported as a backup by an estate that can't log in — the only documented outcome is that the content comes down.

Both paths ask for the same two categories of proof: authority to act (power of attorney, birth certificate, last will and testament, or an estate letter) and proof of death (an obituary or memorial card), submitted through Substack's support widget.

What we could not verify: Substack's live help center blocked direct fetching in this pass; both quotes come from Wayback Machine snapshots roughly seven weeks old, and we could not confirm today's live text matches word for word. We also could not find any Substack-documented exception process for transferring a publication to a co-author or estate — the "cannot transfer ownership" line appears to be an absolute rule, but we can't rule out an unpublished discretionary exception the way American Airlines documents for its miles.

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