How do I cancel a deceased person's subscriptions?

Start with the money, not the accounts. Pull three months of bank and card statements and list every recurring charge. Cancel each one with the provider, using the deceased-customer process where one exists. Check the phone's App Store and Google Play subscription lists for charges that never hit email. Then tell the card issuer the cardholder died: closing the card stops future charges, and charges made after the death date can be disputed.

Family members usually do not owe a deceased relative's bills from their own money; the estate pays (FTC, 2026)
Timeline: an afternoon to build the list, a few weeks to clear it
Watch for: annual renewals that surface months after the death

How do you find every subscription?

Nobody keeps a list of their subscriptions, so you build one from the money trail. Work through these five places and you will catch nearly everything:

Bank and card statements. Pull the last three months for monthly charges, and the last thirteen months to catch annual renewals. Flag every recurring merchant.
The email inbox. Search for "receipt", "renewal", "your subscription", and "payment confirmation". If you cannot get into the email yet, start with our Gmail guide.
The phone's app-store subscriptions. On an iPhone: Settings, the person's name, Subscriptions. On Android: the Play Store profile menu, Payments and subscriptions. These charges often show on statements only as "Apple" or "Google", so this list is the decoder.
PayPal and Venmo. Both keep an automatic-payments list under settings, and both keep charging after a death. See our PayPal guide for closing the account itself.
The browser's saved passwords, if you have computer access. Scan it for streaming, news, storage, and software names you have not seen yet.

A locked phone blocks step three, and that is its own process. Our iCloud and iPhone guide covers it.

Cancel or dispute: which one?

Cancel stops future charges; dispute claws back charges already made. You will use both. For every subscription on the list, cancel with the provider first, because that ends it cleanly at the source. Most cancellations need nothing but the login or a quick support chat. Netflix, for example, cancels a deceased member's account through support with just the account email and the payment details.

Then handle the charges that landed after the date of death. The executor disputes those with the card issuer or bank, and a death certificate settles most of them without a fight. Do not pay a post-death charge to make it go away quietly; the estate's money is the executor's to protect.

Annual renewals are the trap in all of this. A domain name, a cloud backup, an insurance rider on an app: each can sit silent for eleven months and then bill. That is why the statement pull goes back thirteen months, and why the card account should eventually close rather than linger.

Who actually owes these bills?

The estate does. The FTC's guidance on deceased relatives' debts says family members usually do not have to pay from their own money; debts are paid from what the person left, and the executor or court-appointed administrator settles them. Subscriptions are the smallest debts an estate carries, but they are also the only ones that quietly grow while you grieve.

So treat this as triage, not accounting. Stop the bleeding this week, dispute the stragglers next month, and let the estate process handle the rest. The subscriptions are not urgent. The renewals you have not found yet are.

Common questions

Do subscriptions stop automatically when the card is closed?

Mostly, but not reliably. Card networks run account-updater services that hand merchants the replacement card number, and some subscriptions ride along to the new card. Closing the account entirely, rather than replacing the card, is safer, and canceling with each provider is safer still. Do both: cancel at the source, and tell the issuer the cardholder died.

Is the family responsible for subscription charges after the death?

Usually not from their own money. The FTC is plain about this: a deceased person's debts are paid from their estate, and if the estate cannot cover them, they generally go unpaid. Charges a company makes after the death date are a different animal; the executor can dispute those with the card issuer, and providers routinely reverse them when shown a death certificate.

What about the phone plan itself?

Every major U.S. carrier has a bereavement process. Call the carrier, say the account holder died, and they will close or transfer the line with a death certificate, typically without an early-termination fee. Do this after you finish using the phone number for account recovery, because text codes sent to that number are how you get into many of the other accounts.