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Deactivate Users
To deactivate a user’s account so they can no longer log into Salesforce, complete these steps.
Required Editions
| Available in: both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Essentials, Contact Manager, Group, Professional, Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, Developer, and Database.com Editions |
| User Permissions Needed | |
|---|---|
| To deactivate users: | Manage Internal Users |
You can deactivate users, but you can’t delete them outright. Deleting a user can result in orphaned records and the loss of critical business information. Deactivating a user prevents access but preserves all historical activity and records.
- From Setup, in the Quick Find box, enter Users, then select Users.
- Click Edit next to a user’s name.
- Deselect the Active checkbox, and then click Save.
Watch a Demo: 
Removing Users’
Access to Salesforce (Salesforce Classic—English only)
Keep in mind that after deactivation:
- The user remains in the list of users, but is shown as not active.
- The user still appears as a member of public groups they’ve been a part of and any default accounts and sales teams.
- Deactivating the user doesn’t affect the records they owned until ownership is transferred to others.
- All the user’s overrides remain, but they’re frozen.
- In Chatter, the user’s profile remains, but it shows they’re inactive. However, the user remains the owner of any Chatter group they owned until an admin reassigns ownership.
You’re prevented from deactivating a user if the user is the:
- default owner of leads
- default or automated case owner
- default lead creator or owner
- default workflow user
- recipient of a workflow email alert
- a user selected in a custom hierarchy field
- a customer portal administrator.
In these cases you can prevent the user from accessing their accounts by freezing them. Freezing a user is done from the user’s User Record. Later, after updating ownership and other processes, you can deactivate the user’s account.
Finally, if the deactivated user was an approver, you must remove the user from all approval processes, or reassign their approval responsibilities to other users.
