Permanently Remove Access

Organization

can remove members from an organization. Removing a member:

• Eliminates their access to the organization and its data. Removed members need to

  re-join the organization
  to re-gain access.

• Does not delete their Bitwarden account in most cases. Removed members are still able to access their personally-owned vault items unless you

  delete their account
  .

• Is automatically done for organizations using

  directory sync
  if the Remove disabled users during sync option is turned on.

To remove members from your organization:

1. In the Admin Console, go to Members.

2. Select the users you want to remove and select the  Options icon.

3. Select Remove:

   

4. Select Remove members to confirm.



tip

If your organization has a

claimed domain

and the user's account email address matches your claimed domain, Remove is not listed. Instead, you can select Delete to

delete the account permanently

, effectively removing the user’s access to the organization:

Offline devices cache a read-only copy of data, including organization items. Some clients may retain access to this read-only data for a short time after a member is removed. If you anticipate malicious exploitation of this, update credentials the member had access to when you remove them from the organization.



warning

For member accounts that do not have master passwords as a result of

SSO with trusted devices

:

• Removing them from your organization
  eliminates all access to their Bitwarden account unless they were previously assigned a master password using
  account recovery
  and they log in with that master password at least once before being removed.
  
  These users will not be able to re-join your organization unless the above steps are taken before they are removed from the organization. If they aren't, each removed user will be required to
  delete their account
  and be issued a new invitation to create an account and join your organization.

• Revoking access to the organization
  , but not removing them from the organization, will still allow them to log in to Bitwarden and access only their individual vault.

Organizations own all

. When you remove the only member with full

Manage collection permission

to a collection, owners and admins can grant a current member

access to the collection

.

Items saved in My Vault are owned by the individual user. When a member is removed from an organization, the user keeps all items in their My Vault.

In contrast, organizations using the

retain access to data when members are removed. This policy replaces the individually-owned My Vault with the organization-owned

My items

. When a member with data in My Items is removed, their My Items automatically converts into a collection named with the user's email address. Owners and admins can then

assign access to the collection

. After a current member is granted

Manage collection permission

, they can access, edit, and reassign items the same way as a standard Bitwarden collection.



warning

At this time, Bitwarden recommends only organizations that have not started onboarding members to turn on the

Enforce organization data ownership policy

.

If your organization activated the policy before version

2025.11.0

, My items will be created for members confirmed since that release. Preexisting members will not have My items and can continue using their My vault. A future release will allow organizations that already began onboarding members and use individually-owned vaults to migrate all credentials to organization ownership.