How to Access a Deceased Person's Financial Accounts: An Executor's Guide to the Lawful Channels

By The HeirLoft Team · June 30, 2026

Bank accounts, brokerage accounts, and payment apps are where the money literally sits, which makes them the part of an estate people most want to reach quickly — and the part where trying to reach them the wrong way causes the most trouble. The key thing to understand up front reframes the whole task: with a deceased person's financial accounts, you don't "log in." You make a claim to the assets through the institution's estate process, and the institution releases the funds to the estate or the named beneficiary and closes the account.

This is an organizing overview of the official, lawful process for a deceased person's bank and brokerage accounts — not a set of legal or financial steps you're cleared to take. It's a sub-topic of the broader digital estate checklist for executors; start there for the full picture, and use this piece for the financial slice.

Your authority comes from the law, not the login

Whether and how you may deal with a deceased person's financial accounts is governed by law and each institution's process — never by whether you happen to have their online-banking password or PIN.

• It's a claim, not a login. Financial institutions do not hand over account credentials or let you take over the deceased's online banking. They verify your authority, then release the funds to the estate or beneficiary and close the account. Logging in as the deceased, using their PIN, card, or recovery codes, or moving money before you're authorized can violate the account agreement and the law — even with good intentions.
• Your authority comes from documents. In the U.S., a fiduciary's access to a decedent's assets is governed by the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA) and by state probate law — both of which are adopted and applied state by state, and vary by jurisdiction. What you may claim, and what proof each institution requires, depends on the state, the will, and any beneficiary designations. The Uniform Law Commission keeps the official overview of the Act. Because it varies, this is a question for the probate or estate attorney handling the estate.
• Use official channels only. Each institution has an estate, bereavement, or deceased-account services process. That process — plus the authority granted through the will and probate and your attorney's guidance — is the door to use.

Two paths: beneficiary designation vs. the estate

Which path an account follows usually comes down to whether the deceased named a beneficiary on it:

• Payable-on-death (POD) / transfer-on-death (TOD) accounts. A bank account with a POD beneficiary, or a brokerage account with a TOD registration, passes directly to the named person and generally bypasses probate. The beneficiary claims it from the institution with a death certificate and ID, often without full estate administration. If you're the executor, confirm which accounts carry these designations — they may not run through the estate at all.
• Accounts with no beneficiary. These run through the formal estate process: the executor or administrator, once appointed, claims and consolidates them into the estate under court authority, and they're distributed per the will or state law.

A related tool people confuse with access: some firms let a customer name a FINRA trusted contact person. A trusted contact is someone the firm may reach out to about the account (for example, if they suspect fraud or can't reach the client) — it is not account access, trading authority, or a beneficiary designation. Naming one doesn't let that person into the account. FINRA publishes investor education on trusted contacts and on transferring a deceased person's account; find it on FINRA's own investor site (finra.org) rather than a third-party route.

Before you start

Institutions will ask you to prove the death and your authority before they release anything. In broad strokes, gather: a certified copy of the death certificate, your government ID, and — for accounts running through the estate — letters testamentary or letters of administration (the court document naming you). For deposit accounts, the FDIC's consumer guidance on deposit insurance explains how insured deposits are treated, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Managing Someone Else's Money guides lay out a fiduciary's responsibilities. Then contact each institution's estate / bereavement / deceased-account services line — search "[institution] estate services" or call the number on a statement — rather than deep-linking to any specific bank page, since those change often.

You also can't claim or close what you haven't found. The clearest record of which institutions someone actually used is sitting in their inbox — statements, "your payment posted" notices, and recurring charges name the banks, cards, and brokerages in one place. The same discovery step that starts every estate applies here: see how to find a deceased person's subscriptions and recurring charges, and let HeirLoft's Subscription Autopsy surface the recurring charges — and the accounts behind them — automatically.

Start by surfacing what existed

The recurring side is the most time-sensitive

Of everything financial, the recurring charges are what keep moving until someone stops them, so they're worth surfacing first. Cards and bank accounts keep paying subscriptions and memberships after death, and each has its own cancellation or bereavement process — see how to cancel a deceased person's subscriptions, platform by platform. Knowing what's drawing on an account also tells you which institutions to contact and in what order, which is why surfacing the recurring charges early makes the rest of the financial work faster.

If you're planning ahead — spare your own family the claim scramble

If you're reading this to make it easier on your own family rather than as an executor, the highest-leverage moves are the ones that decide these accounts in advance: set POD/TOD beneficiary designations on your bank and brokerage accounts, name the accounts in your will or trust with your attorney, and leave a clear record of what exists and what you want done with it. That record is about decisions, not passwords — see how to leave an organized list of your accounts for your family, and, since forgotten recurring charges are the hardest part to reconstruct, the subscriptions you forgot you're paying for.

This is one item on a larger checklist

Financial accounts are one category in an executor's work, alongside the email account that ties the digital estate together and the social and photo accounts that need their own handling. Self-custodied crypto and domain names are deliberately out of scope here — with no institution to petition, they follow a different path (registrar account recovery for domains, and private-key/seed-phrase custody for crypto), covered separately. For how all the pieces fit together, start from the digital estate checklist for executors.

To be clear: this is about organizing and routing each account to its proper, lawful process — not a recommendation to take any particular financial action, and not a substitute for legal or financial advice. What you're permitted to claim or close, and in what order, is a question for the attorney handling the estate.

See what you're really paying for

Nothing here is legal or financial advice. Fiduciary access to a decedent's assets varies by state and situation — for your specific case, consult the probate or estate attorney handling the estate.