How can I delete my account?

Question

How can I delete my Stack Exchange account(s)? Also,

• What happens to my content? Can I request it be deleted as well?
• What if I'm suspended, rate-limited, or banned from posting questions or answers?
• What will happen to my votes? Will other users be impacted?
• Why wasn't my account deleted immediately after the timer expiring?
• What will happen to my pending bounties and close, reopen, delete, or undelete votes?
• I want my account deleted on all Stack Exchange sites. How do I do this?
• Will my profile on chat be removed once I delete my site account?

For more information, see "How do I delete my account?" in the Help Center.

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Answer 1

If you want to delete your account on a single site, the Help Center explains how.

1. On your user page (on the main, not child meta, site), click "Edit Profile & Settings".
2. Go to "Delete Profile" link:

3. Read the carefully the page that will appear. If you're sure you still want to delete, mark the checkbox.
4. Click the Delete Profile button:

The page can be immediately accessed with sitename.com/users/delete/current

After doing this, one of these two things will happen:

1. If you have never made any posts using your profile, and have 101 or less reputation, your account will be immediately deleted.
2. Otherwise, the account will be scheduled for deletion. During that time, you can cancel the deletion request by visiting your profile and clicking the cancel link in the banner at the top. Otherwise, it will be deleted after (approximately - see below) 24 hours.

Following this process on a single site will only delete your account on that site, and will not affect any other site accounts that are linked to your network profile. If you want your account deleted on all sites, see I want my account deleted on all Stack Exchange sites below.

I can't follow the above instructions to delete my account. What can I do?

• Suspended users: If you are suspended, you will get an error message when opening the Edit Profile page because you cannot edit your profile while suspended. You can still access the Delete Profile subpage though, either through the help center article, by selecting the "I need to delete my user profile" option on the contact page, or by navigating to /users/delete/current on the site you want to delete your account.
• Stack Overflow for Teams members: If you're a member of a Stack Overflow Team, you will not be able to use the above procedure to delete your Stack Overflow account; you must leave all Teams you're a member of first. (You can still delete your own account on any site other than Stack Overflow.)
• Area 51 profiles: As Area 51 runs off a significantly older version of the Stack Exchange software, the ability to delete your own account is not implemented there. You may request deletion of your Area 51 account by using the contact form there (choose "I need to delete my user profile", then close the dialog box).

Why is there a 24-hour timer for deletion?

The 24-hour waiting period exists to better emphasize that deleting your account is irreversible - you cannot later request that your account be restored (see the next section). To prevent people from "rage-quitting" and regretting it later, the system provides a final opportunity to decide against deleting one's account.

What happens to the reputation and badges I've earned? Can I request my account be restored?

All reputation and badges you've earned on your account will be erased. Posts will generally not be deleted, but will be dissociated - i.e. will no longer be "owned" by an account, so you will cease to have special privileges on them. Any votes on your posts will no longer earn reputation for any account, though other users can still start and award bounties on them.

You cannot later request that your account be restored - if you later decide to rejoin the site, you will start off as a brand new user. You will not be able to regain ownership or reputation of your prior posts; you must start building your privileges as a new user. (Do note that if you've ever earned the network-wide association bonus rights, and you create an account with the same credentials you earned the association bonus on, your new account will start off with the bonus.)

What happens to my content? Can I request it be deleted as well?

Content you've posted on the site is owned by you, but licensed to Stack Exchange, and you therefore cannot request that it be deleted with your account. Your posts will be effectively dissociated from your account; your username will no longer show on them, but it will instead show your denormalized username (e.g. "user123456" where 123456 was the user ID of your account).

However, certain posts you've made that have a score of -1 or lower will be deleted by the Community user immediately once your account is deleted: this includes answers, closed questions, and open questions with no positively-scored answers. Additionally, any questions you've asked that have a score of 1 and otherwise meet the automatic deletion criteria for RemoveAbandonedQuestions (1 year old, no answers, low views, etc.) will be automatically deleted once the automated deletion script runs every week. These only apply on main Q&A sites; on meta sites, no posts are automatically deleted for any reason as a result of account deletion.

Will deleting my account clear any restrictions placed on my account?

No, it won't. Deleting your account while you are suspended by a moderator or rate-limited or banned by the automated quality filter will not remove any restrictions placed on your account. They will simply be re-applied to any new accounts you create.

What will happen to my votes? Will other users be impacted?

Unless you've cast a lot of votes, your votes will be invalidated and other users will have their reputation recalculated as if your votes were never cast. Additionally, other users will lose reputation from approved suggested edits where you were the final approver. (Bounties you awarded will be kept.)

If you did cast a lot of votes, your votes may be kept (or more accurately, moved to the Community user) to prevent high-impact, widespread changes to other users' reputation. See the next section for more info.

Why wasn't my account deleted immediately after the timer expiring?

Accounts are not deleted immediately after the timer expires, but by a scheduled task that runs once an hour. Thus, you may see a notice that says "this account is scheduled for deletion [x] minutes ago", e.g. "5 minutes ago". This is intentional and by design; your account will be deleted within an hour of the timer expiring provided you haven't cast a lot of votes.

If your account has cast a lot of votes, it will not be deleted approximately after the 24-hour timer expires, as above. Deletion will be held up while a Stack Exchange employee checks your account to determine if your votes should be preserved (in most cases, they are, but in some cases, such as your account having a history of voting fraud, they aren't). During this hold-up, you may see a deletion notice that says that your account is scheduled to be deleted for some date in the past; this is confusing, but not a sign of a bug.

The queue of accounts awaiting deletion is processed every Wednesday and Friday, excluding holidays. This means that if your account falls into this queue, it could take up to three business days for your deletion request to be processed. If you requested deletion during the annual winter holiday season (the second half of December plus the first week of January), your deletion will not be processed until well into January, due to the long holiday period and the backlog of accounts awaiting deletion.

If your account has not been deleted and it's been more than three business days (weekdays, excluding U.S. holidays) since the timer has expired, or if you requested deletion during the winter holiday period and the request hasn't been processed into the month of February, it's possible that your request may have slipped through the cracks somehow; send a contact request using the contact form to let the staff know.

What will happen to my pending bounties and close, reopen, delete, or undelete votes?

If you had any pending bounties or votes while your account is deleted, those will be moved to (owned by) the Community user. In the case of bounties, you can no longer manually award them and they will be awarded automatically at the end as they normally would.

I want my account deleted on all Stack Exchange sites. How do I do this?

The fastest way to have all your network accounts deleted is to go to every single site on which you have a profile, and request deletion on all those individually. (If you have an Area 51 account, file a contact request there to request that just that profile be removed, and use the normal button to request deletion of your other accounts.)

You may find some older posts that say that you must contact us to request deletion of all your site accounts, but we no longer accept such requests except under exceptional circumstances.

Your network profile on stackexchange.com will be automatically deleted within 24 hours (whenever it attempts to sync again), unless you have ever manually logged in directly on stackexchange.com - in that case, you have a physical profile there and it will need to be deleted by staff. Contact us once all your account deletions have been fully processed, and we'll get it deleted.

Will my profile on chat be removed once I delete my site account?

Chat profiles are automatically deleted when the last qualifying site account is removed. This means that:

• On the sites with their own separate chat servers (Stack Overflow and Meta Stack Exchange), deleting your account on one of these sites will also delete your corresponding chat profile on the respective site-specific server (chat.stackoverflow.com or chat.meta.stackexchange.com).
• All other sites on the network have their chat rooms hosted on the general Stack Exchange chat server (chat.stackexchange.com), where if you've chatted in the past you'll have one profile that is shared with all sites. Your profile on that server will be automatically deleted once all of your site accounts are deleted (including accounts on Stack Overflow and Meta.SE).

Note that your chat profile on a given server will not be deleted if you've posted 1,000 or more messages in the past with your profile on that server, or if your (last) site account was deleted prior to August 2016. If you'd like your chat account deleted and it wasn't removed when you otherwise qualified under the above criteria, contact SE to request it.

Miscellaneous information

• Your old username will continue to be visible in comments that reply to you, as well as in the Stack Exchange Data Explorer until it gets updated at the end of the week and in monthly data dumps published when your account was active.

• Unless your votes were preserved, users will lose the +2 rep awarded to them if you were the final user to approve one of their suggested edits. This is an anti-abuse feature.

• If you've posted questions or answers that were later migrated to another site, and you delete and later recreate your account on the target site, those posts will be reattributed to your current account. (This is an exception to the normal rule that you can't reclaim ownership of your prior posts.)

• Inactive accounts with very little to no overall activity, which haven't been seen for a period of two years, are automatically removed.

See also

• What does "user was removed" mean and why did my reputation change because of it?
• How can I delete my Stack Exchange Data Explorer account?