Considerations for Deactivating Users
Situations Preventing Deactivation
Some situations can prevent you from deactivating a user. In these cases, you must freeze the user’s account first to prevent logins while you reassign ownership, memberships, and so on, as needed. Then you can deactivate later.
User Licenses and Billing
A deactivated user doesn’t count against your organization’s available user licenses.
However, deactivating a user doesn’t reduce the number of licenses for which your organization is billed.
To change your billing, you must change your organization’s license count.
Users in Custom Hierarchy Fields
You can’t deactivate a user that’s selected in a custom hierarchy field—even if you delete the field.
To deactivate a user in a custom hierarchy field, delete and permanently erase the field first.
Process Builder
Processes can’t update records owned by inactive users.
When you deactivate a user, also transfer that user’s records to an active user to avoid failed processes.
Workflow Email Alert Recipients
You can’t deactivate a user who’s assigned as the sole recipient of a workflow email alert.
Customer Portal Administrator Users
You can’t deactivate a user that’s selected as a Customer Portal Administrator.
Permission Set and Permission Set Group Assignments
Inactive users can still be assigned to permission sets and permission set groups.
It’s recommended to remove these assignments after deactivation.
In general, standard permission sets related to permission set licenses can’t be added to permission set groups assigned to inactive users.
To avoid this behavior, remove users from permission sets and permission set groups after you deactivate them.
Record Access
Deactivated users lose access to any records manually shared directly with them or implicitly shared as team members.
Users higher in the role hierarchy relative to the deactivated users also lose access to those records.
If a user was manually shared with more than 10,000 account records, delete those shares using the Bulk API before deactivating the user to prevent performance issues.
Chatter
If you deactivate users where Chatter is enabled:
They’re removed from Following and Followers lists.
If reactivated, their subscriptions are restored — except for users who followed each other before deactivation.
For example, if User A follows User B, and both are deactivated, their mutual subscriptions aren’t restored upon reactivation.
Salesforce Files
Files owned by a deactivated user aren’t deleted.
The deactivated user remains the file owner until an admin reassigns ownership.
Files shared in a content library can be edited by other library members with author or delete permissions.
Sharing rules remain active until modified by an admin.
Created By Fields
Inactive users can still appear in Created By fields.
Some system operations create records using an arbitrary administrator user—this user can be active or inactive.
Records Owned by Deactivated Users
Admins can still create and edit records (accounts, opportunities, custom objects) owned by inactive users.
However, if a user owns more than 10,000 records for an object, it’s recommended to transfer ownership before deactivation to avoid system performance issues.
Enterprise Territory Management
Deactivated users are automatically removed from territories they were assigned to.
Account and Opportunity Teams
Deactivated users are removed from the default opportunity and account teams of other users.
Their own default teams aren’t removed.
If a user with Read/Write access is reactivated, their access reverts to Read Only.
Opportunity Teams
If opportunity splits are enabled, deactivated users aren’t removed from teams where they’re assigned a split percentage.
Reassign split percentages before deactivation.
Delegated External User Administrators
A delegated external user admin who deactivates a portal user can’t remove that user from teams they belong to.
Lightning Dashboards
If you deactivate a user who owns or runs a Lightning Dashboard, the dashboard might not return expected results.
To prevent issues, change the dashboard owner before deactivation.
CRM Analytics
When you deactivate a user who scheduled a dataflow, the dataflow schedule is deleted and becomes unscheduled.
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