Transfer unmanaged work accounts

Available only if you signed up directly online and verified your domain

If your users signed up for a personal account for a service, such as Gmail, using their work email address, go instead to Transfer unmanaged personal accounts.

Not sure what type of unmanaged accounts your users have? Go to What type of unmanaged accounts do my users have? (later on this page).

After you verify your organization's domain, you can transfer unmanaged work accounts so that all users become managed users. You can then apply the same admin controls for these users as any other managed users. You can manage their user profile, control password strength, and apply data governance and security features. Once a user is a managed user, they can't use that same work email address to create an unmanaged work account.

About unmanaged work accounts

When a user in your organization uses their work email address to sign up for a Google service, such as an Essentials edition or Google Cloud, they create an unmanaged work account. This type of account also includes unmanaged school accounts created by Google Workspace for Education users.

For any service other than Google Cloud, a user who creates an unmanaged work account can invite other users who don't have Google Accounts in your organization to collaborate with them as a team. Each team member's user account then becomes an unmanaged work account within the team.

For teams containing multiple unmanaged work accounts, transferring the team brings all of its users under admin management. You can only transfer the team, not the individual user accounts within the team. To help you decide whether to transfer a team, you can review the unmanaged work accounts that belong to it. After you transfer an unmanaged work account, it can't be reverted to an unmanaged account.

What happens if I don't transfer an unmanaged work account?

If you don't transfer an unmanaged work account, that team member can continue to use that account. You can transfer the account at any time when you're ready.

Review & transfer unmanaged work accounts

Before you begin: To check if an unmanaged work account you want to transfer belongs to a current employee, contact your company's human resources department or similar resource. You can transfer a former employee's account if you want to manage the Workspace data created by the user.

  1. In the Google Admin console, go to Menu and then Directory and then Unmanaged users and then Work accounts.

    Requires having the Transfer unmanaged work accounts administrator privilege.

  2. For the team you want, click Actions and then View users and review the unmanaged user accounts belonging to the team.
  3. On the Work accounts screen, choose an option:
    • To transfer individual teams—Next to each team name, check the box.
    • To transfer all teams—At the top, next to Work account name, check the box.
  4. At the top, click Transfer.
  5. Review any licensing or subscription changes and then check the box to agree to the license agreements
  6. Click Transfer.

The transfer process can take several minutes for each user. If you're transferring a large team or multiple teams, the process can take several hours. You can't perform any subscription-management tasks until the entire process is complete.

What happens during the transfer?

  • Users are moved to new organizational units—When you transfera team of unmanaged work accounts, that team's users are placed in an organizational unit directly under the top-level organizational unit and your organization's policies are applied to those users. Each transferred team is set up as its own organizational unit. The organizational units are assigned an alphanumeric label during transfer, so you might need to search for a user's name to find where they are located. After the transfer, you can rename the organizational units or move users to existing organizational units as needed to create the structure you want.
  • User and team data is migrated—User data, such as a user's Google Calendar and Drive files, as well as collective team data, such as shared drives and ChromeOS device data, are migrated to the new managed user accounts.
  • Your licensing and billing might change—For details, go to Understand licensing & billing changes (later on this page).
  • If you're using Chrome Enterprise or Chrome Enterprise Core— For additional information, go to Merging teams after domain verification.

Understand licensing & billing changes

When you transfer a team of unmanaged work accounts, we cancel billing for those accounts. We assign new licenses to team members and add any charges to your organization's billing account.

All users in a given team get the same new license. If you're transferring more than one team, each team might get a different license, depending on your organization's subscriptions.

Subscriptions in the same family

If you have a subscription in the same edition family as an unmanaged account's subscription, we assign a license for your subscription to that user and bill you for the additional license. For example, if your organization has an Enterprise Essentials subscription and the unmanaged account has an Essentials subscription, during the transfer, we assign Enterprise Essentials licenses to that user and adjust your monthly charge accordingly. If the user account you're transferring has the Cloud Identity Free edition, we assign that user a free Cloud Identity license under your organization.

No subscriptions in the same family

If you don't have a subscription in the same edition family as the unmanaged account's subscription, we create a subscription and assign a license to that user. When we create a subscription, we choose the best option that provides feature parity with the account's existing subscription and avoids data loss. For example, if your organization has an Enterprise Essentials subscription and the unmanaged account has a Business Starter subscription, during the transfer, we create a Business Starter subscription for your organization and assign a license for that subscription to that user.

If we create a new subscription, we don't charge your account for the new subscription for 7 days. During this time, you need to choose one of the following options:

  • Set up billing—Set up billing to continue the new subscription for these users and prevent any data loss. For details, go to Set up Google Workspace billing.
  • Remove or reassign licenses—To avoid the cost of a new subscription, you can remove the users' licenses and assign them licenses to your organization's existing subscription. You can then cancel the newly created subscription. Taking this action, however, risks potential data loss unless your existing subscription provides the capabilities and services needed to retain their data. For details, go to Assign, remove, and reassign licenses.

If you take no action after 7 days, we suspend all user accounts on the new subscription. For steps on restoring a user after suspension, go to Restore a suspended user.

What happens after the transfer?

  • Users are notified—Users from the transferred unmanaged work account get an email telling them that their Google Account has a new administrator.
  • You become the sole admin for users—Any previous admins lose access to management controls, such as the Team dashboard (Essentials only) or Admin console. If needed, add back administrative privileges to their accounts. For details, go to Make a user an admin.
  • Users lose access to Chat spaces—Users in any unmanaged accounts that you transfer can no longer access their Chat spaces, including messages and tasks, that they used when their account was in an unmanaged state.
  • Users might need to set up a password—If the transferred account has a Google Cloud subscription, users from those accounts might be prompted to create a password the next time they sign in to their Workspace account.
  • You need to secure former employee accounts—If you transferred a former employee's account, for security, we recommend changing the account's password or suspending the account after the transfer.
  • Chat apps might need to be migrated—If the transferred accounts have Workspace subscriptions with developed Chat apps, they might not work properly after the transfer. To keep their apps working, developers might need to migrate them to a Google Cloud project. For details, go to Migrate your Google Chat app.

Monitor for new unmanaged work accounts

You can review the Admin log events to flag and transfer any future unmanaged work accounts in your organization. In the log events, look for New Unmanaged Team Created. A log event is not created if an invited user joins a team and creates an unmanaged work account. For details, go to Admin log events.

You can also set up an activity rule so that you get an alert whenever a user creates an unmanaged team. When you create the rule, select Admin log events as the data source and in the Condition builder, choose Event as the attribute, Is as the operator, and New Unmanaged Team Created as the value. For details, go to Create an activity rule.

To turn off an unmanaged user's ability to create an unmanaged work account, go to Prevent new unmanaged work accounts.

What type of unmanaged accounts do my users have?

To check for unmanaged work accounts:

  1. In the Google Admin console, go to Menu and then Directory and then Unmanaged users and then Work accounts.

    Requires having the View unmanaged work accounts administrator privilege.

  2. Check if any accounts are listed.

To check for unmanaged personal accounts:

  1. In the Google Admin console, go to Menu and then Directory and then Unmanaged users and then Personal accounts.

    You must be signed in as a super administrator for this task.

  2. Check if any accounts are listed.

If Unmanaged users isn't available, you have no users with unmanaged work or personal accounts.