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Google Workspace Will Now Delete Team Calendars When You Delete the Employee Who Owns Them

Google began rolling out a change on October 5, 2026: deleting a Workspace user also deletes the extra calendars they own, such as a shared time-off or service calendar, and suspending a user suspends them. How to find who owns your shared calendars, and the step to add to offboarding.

Kevin R.

10 min read

Photo by Eric Rothermel on Unsplash

The takeaway

Before you suspend or delete a departing employee's Google account, transfer the calendars they own to someone who is staying, and check that the new owner shows in each calendar's settings.

Most small offices have at least one Google calendar that everyone depends on: the team time-off calendar, the service schedule, the company holiday list. In Google’s system, each of those calendars belongs to one person, normally whoever created it.

On Monday, October 5, 2026, Google began rolling out a change that ties those calendars to that person’s account. According to Google Workspace Updates, “when a user account is deleted, any secondary calendars owned by that user will be deleted as well,” and when a user is suspended, “their owned secondary calendars will be suspended as well.” Google says the change applies to all Google Workspace customers and Workspace Individual subscribers.

So the next time someone leaves and their account is deleted or suspended the usual way, a calendar the whole team uses can go with it. The fix is one step to add to your offboarding checklist: transfer the calendars first.

What’s changing

A secondary calendar is Google’s term for any calendar other than the one each account gets automatically. According to Google Calendar Help, that means any calendar you create, plus group calendars shared with you. Google’s own examples of group calendars are a company holiday calendar and one for organization-wide meetings (Google Workspace Admin Help).

  • Every secondary calendar has one owner. Under a change Google announced on Tuesday, November 11, 2025, whoever creates a secondary calendar becomes its owner, and older calendars were assigned an owner based on who had access to them (Google Workspace Updates). Group calendars work the same way. Google’s admin help says, “The administrator or user who creates a group calendar owns that calendar.”
  • Deleting the owner deletes the calendar and its events. Google’s admin help says this includes group calendars, and adds: “You also won’t be able to make any additional transfers once a calendar owner is deleted.” In its announcement, Google notes: “This matches the behavior of primary calendars.”
  • Suspending the owner suspends the calendar. Suspending is the Admin console option that temporarily blocks someone’s access without deleting their data (Google Workspace Admin Help). Google’s announcement doesn’t describe what colleagues see when a calendar is suspended, so don’t plan on the team being able to keep using it.
  • Google scheduled its safety net to end on October 5. Its March announcement said that until then it would periodically assign orphaned calendars to someone with Make changes and manage sharing access. Don’t rely on that reassignment process when offboarding someone now.

Google originally planned the Workspace change for Monday, April 27, 2026, then postponed it after customers asked for better management tools.

It may not have reached you yet. Google calls the October rollout an “extended rollout,” which can take “potentially longer than 15 days for feature visibility,” so your organization may not have the change yet. That isn’t a reason to wait, because the steps below are the same either way.

Who is affected

Any business on Google Workspace where a calendar the team relies on was created by one person. In a 10 to 50 person office, that might be the office manager, a team lead, or whoever first set up Google Workspace.

Pay closest attention to calendars owned by:

  • Someone who might leave, including seasonal and part-time staff.
  • A former employee whose account you suspended instead of deleting, to keep their email and files. Google’s post doesn’t say whether calendars owned by accounts suspended before the change reaches you are affected. Treat them as at risk.
  • A former IT person or outside admin who created your shared calendars from an account in your organization.

If you keep former employees on an Archived User license, which Google offers as a lower-cost way to keep a former employee’s data (Google Workspace Admin Help), note that the announcement covers deleted and suspended accounts and doesn’t mention archived ones. Transfer their calendars anyway.

If your business runs on free Gmail accounts instead of Workspace, Google Calendar Help also says to transfer calendars you want to keep before deleting their owner’s account.

The catch in the usual delete steps

When a super admin deletes a user in the Admin console, Google offers to transfer the person’s Data in other apps, including Calendar, to someone else. According to Google’s admin help, that option moves only future, non-private events with at least one guest or resource from the person’s primary calendar. Google is explicit: “Secondary calendars and their events don’t transfer.”

Google’s delete-user help adds that when you choose to transfer data, the account is suspended until the transfer completes and is then deleted. Checking the Calendar box during deletion doesn’t protect your team calendars. Transfer them as a separate step, before you start deleting.

Step 1: Find out who owns your shared calendars

  1. Open Google Calendar on a computer.
  2. Point to a shared calendar in the left-hand list, open its Options menu, and select Settings and sharing.
  3. Look for the owner. In Google’s screenshots, the settings page shows an Owner field, and the owner is labeled Owner in the sharing list (Google Workspace Updates). If it isn’t visible to you, ask someone who manages that calendar to check their settings, or have your IT provider look it up through the Calendar API.

Write down each shared calendar, its current owner, and who should own it long-term. For calendars the whole business depends on, pick someone likely to stay, such as the business owner or a long-serving manager, rather than whoever happened to create it.

For a larger inventory, an IT provider with authorized access to users’ calendars can build a list using the Calendar API. Its dataOwner field identifies the owner of an individual calendar; this takes an inventory across users, rather than a single organization-wide report (Google Calendar API release notes).

Step 2: Transfer ownership before anyone leaves

Google’s October 5 announcement lists three ways to do it.

In the Admin console (admins). Go to Menu > Apps > Google Workspace > Calendar > Event and Secondary calendar management > Secondary calendar transfer. Enter the From user and the To user, then click Transfer Secondary Calendars (Google Workspace Admin Help). Keep in mind:

  • It moves all of that person’s secondary calendars to one recipient, who can then delete any the team doesn’t need.
  • It requires the Manage Calendars admin privilege, and the new owner must be in your organization.
  • The recipient doesn’t have to accept, according to Google’s March post.
  • Calendars move one at a time, and Google warns that with several calendars “the process could take a substantial amount of time.” Before you suspend or delete the old account, check that the new owner shows in each calendar’s settings.

In Google Calendar (the departing employee). Only the current owner can do this. In Google Calendar on a computer, under My calendars, open Options next to the calendar and select Settings and sharing. Under Shared with, open the drop-down next to the new owner, select Transfer ownership, and confirm (Google Calendar Help). The new owner must already be on the calendar’s sharing list and in your organization.

The catch: the new owner gets an email and “has 60 days to accept ownership,” and the departing employee stays the owner until they accept. If the account is suspended or deleted before then, the calendar is still the departing employee’s when the account goes. Have the new owner accept the transfer before the employee’s last day.

With the Calendar API (IT providers). Google’s release notes date this option to Thursday, June 18, 2026. Admins with the Manage Calendars privilege can transfer an individual calendar through transferOwnership. The calendar must be active: the API doesn’t support transferring disabled or deleted calendars.

If an account is already suspended or deleted

Already suspended. Google’s Admin console instructions cover users who haven’t been deleted, but its API documentation excludes disabled calendars. The documents don’t resolve what happens when the owner is suspended. Ask your IT provider to check the Admin console transfer and contact Google Workspace support if it fails. Don’t reactivate a former employee’s account just to experiment with recovery.

Already deleted. Google’s March announcement describes deletion of the owner’s secondary calendars as permanent. Its delete-user help still describes a 20-day user-restoration window that can recover calendars. Those documents don’t establish that calendars deleted under the new rule are recoverable. Don’t count on that window as a backup: contact your IT provider and Google Workspace support the same day. NST hasn’t tested recovery under this change.

Add this to your offboarding checklist

Before you suspend or delete a departing employee’s account:

  1. With the employee, check the calendars under My calendars and note where they are the owner, or have your IT provider build the inventory through the API. The Admin console transfer moves all their secondary calendars to one recipient.
  2. Pick a new owner who is staying for each calendar the team still uses.
  3. Transfer the calendars, either in the Admin console or by the employee. If the employee does it, make sure the new owner accepts.
  4. Confirm the new owner shows in each calendar’s settings.
  5. Separately, decide what happens to their primary calendar: transfer future events, cancel them, or release booked meeting rooms, as described in Google’s admin help.
  6. Only then suspend or delete the account.

Going forward, when someone creates a calendar the whole team will use, write down who owns it in your IT records.

Questions to ask your IT provider

  • “Which of our shared calendars are owned by someone who might leave, or by an account that’s already suspended?”
  • “Does our offboarding process transfer secondary calendars before suspending or deleting an account, and do you confirm the transfer finished?”
  • “What backup and support options do we have if a calendar disappears? Has recovery actually been tested under the new rule?”

For another Google Workspace change worth an admin’s attention, see our post on Google Meet’s automatic AI notes.

If you’d like help checking who owns your shared calendars or tightening your offboarding steps, NightSquawk Tech offers a free assessment.

Sources

Editorial note: This article was drafted with AI assistance from Google’s Workspace Updates posts, Help Center pages and Calendar API documentation, linked above. Menu paths and setting names are as Google documented them on October 7, 2026, and may change. NightSquawk Tech did not independently test the transfer, suspend or restore steps described here.