What happens to my subscriptions and recurring charges when I die?

Nothing stops automatically. A subscription is a standing instruction to a card or bank account, and it keeps charging until either (a) the subscription itself is canceled, or (b) the payment method behind it stops working (the card is closed, the bank account is frozen).

Some routes for stopping platform-native subscriptions are documented directly by the platforms themselves. Closing an Apple Account (available through Apple's deceased-account request process, see Q2/Q14) would stop Apple-billed subscriptions — App Store, iCloud+, Apple Music, etc. — tied to that account. Source Google's deceased-user process similarly offers account closure as one of its three outcomes, which would stop Google-billed subscriptions (YouTube Premium, Google One, etc.). Source In both cases, closing the account is described as effectively final — Google specifically warns that closing forecloses any later request for the account's contents, so closing should generally be the last step, after data has been retrieved, not the first.

Third-party subscriptions billed directly to a credit or debit card (streaming services, apps, memberships, anything not billed through Apple or Google's own store) are a different problem entirely: closing the deceased's Apple or Google account does nothing to stop them. The practical path is the same one used for any other debt or recurring charge in an estate: notify the bank or card issuer of the death (which typically freezes or closes the card, stopping future charges), and separately review recent statements — paper or digital — to identify what's still charging, so each vendor can be canceled directly.

What we could not verify: we were not able to locate a single authoritative government or consumer-protection source (FTC and CFPB pages we attempted to fetch on this specific topic returned 404) laying out a definitive, step-by-step legal process for canceling a deceased person's subscriptions. The guidance above reflects how account closure and card cancellation mechanically work, verified against Apple's and Google's own documentation, rather than a single canonical "what to do" checklist from a regulator.

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