Pause your Workspace subscription

Supported editions for this feature: Business Starter, Business Standard, and Business Plus; Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus. Compare your edition

If you need a break from full service, you can temporarily pause your Google Workspace subscription and pay a reduced cost instead of canceling. Your organization's account and data remain active, and you can easily resume service later.

Check the requirements

Your organization can pause a Workspace subscription if:

  • You have a supported subscription (details earlier on this page) and have fewer than 300 users.
  • You're on the Flexible Plan for billing.

Review user & admin impacts

When you pause your subscription:

  • Users are signed out of and lose access to Workspace services, such as Gmail and Google Drive and Meet.
  • You and other administrators can still sign in to the Google Admin console to manage billing and resume the subscription.
  • Your subscription continues at a reduced price, and you get a monthly invoice at your secondary email address. If you need to add or update a secondary email address, go to Send important messages to another admin account.
  • In the Admin console, the status of your subscription displays as Paused.
  • Data loss prevention (DLP) for Drive data protection rules continue to run on your data. For details, go to Create DLP for Drive rules and custom content detectors.

Pause your subscription

  1. In the Google Admin console, go to Menu and then Billing and then Subscriptions.

    Requires having the Billing management privilege.

  2. Click the Workspace subscription that you want to pause.
  3. Click Cancel Subscription.
  4. On the Consider one of these options instead of cancelling page, click Pause Subscription. You only get this option if you're eligible to pause your subscription.
  5. Review the confirmation message and then click Confirm.

After you confirm, users in your organization are immediately signed out of all Workspace services, except for admins who remain signed in to the Admin console.

Resume a paused subscription

When you’re ready to restart full service, you can resume your subscription in the Admin console.

  1. Sign in to the Admin console.
  2. Click Resume Now.
  3. Review the confirmation message and then click Confirm.

After you resume, you and your users regain access to all Workspace services. Your subscription resumes at the current active price for your region. Any previous discounts you had might not apply.