Two minutes to set up, free, and worth doing. It also stops short of the thing most people assume it covers, and Apple says so in its own documentation.
The short answer: an Apple Legacy Contact is the person Apple will let into your Apple Account after you die. Setting one up takes about two minutes and you should do it. But Apple’s own support page names what the feature leaves out, and the excluded category is the consequential one: the data in your iCloud Keychain, which is where your passwords, passkeys, and saved payment information live. Your family gets your photos, messages, notes, and files. They do not get your logins. This page covers the exact setup steps on each device, and the part you still have to solve somewhere else.
Apple describes the covered data as photos, messages, notes, files, device backups, and more. In practice that is the contents of the Apple Account: the personal and sentimental material your family is most likely to want, plus the device backups that make an old iPhone recoverable.
A few details worth knowing before you start. You can name more than one Legacy Contact, and any one of them can act alone, including permanently deleting the account data. The person you name does not need an Apple Account or an Apple device of their own. They do need to be over 13, an age that varies by country. And on your side, the device you set this up from needs iOS 15.2, iPadOS 15.2, or macOS Monterey 12.1 or later, with two-factor authentication turned on.
One quiet consequence of a successful request: once Apple approves it, the original Apple Account stops working and Activation Lock comes off the devices that used it. Those devices then have to be erased and restored before anyone can use them again.
Apple states the exclusions directly: “Inaccessible data includes movies, music, books, or subscriptions you purchased with your Apple Account, and data stored in your iCloud Keychain (payment information, passwords, and passkeys).” Read that second half slowly. The passwords are out. The passkeys are out. The saved cards are out.
This is the fact that reframes the whole feature. Your Keychain is not a minor corner of your Apple Account. For most people it is the index to their entire financial life: the bank login, the brokerage login, the insurance portal, the utility accounts, the password to the email address that every other account uses for password resets. Apple hands your family the photo library and keeps the keyring.
The knock-on effect is the one estate attorneys have started writing about: your family can hold the correct password and still be locked out, because the account also wants a verification code that goes to a phone nobody can unlock.
So the tool answers “what happens to my Apple data” and leaves “how does my family get into everything that is not Apple” completely untouched. Both are real questions. Only one of them has a two-minute setting. The other is the wider problem of what happens to your accounts when you die, and no single platform’s legacy tool reaches across institutions to solve it.
Exclusion wording quoted from Apple, “How to add a Legacy Contact for your Apple Account” (Apple’s published date: April 2, 2026), checked August 4, 2026.
Five steps, and the only decision you make is how to hand over the access key.
You will get an email confirming the contact was added. To see or re-share the key later, return to the same screen, tap the person’s name, and tap View Access Key. If they are with you, they can scan the QR code from their own device.
Same flow, different menu path.
Menu paths verified against Apple’s support documentation on August 4, 2026. Apple reorganizes these settings periodically, so if a label has moved, search Settings for “Legacy Contact” rather than hunting the tree.
The access key is not a formality. Your Legacy Contact needs it twice: once to file the request, and again to sign in after Apple approves. And Apple is unambiguous about what happens if it goes missing. Apple cannot access or replace an access key that has been lost or misplaced.
That single sentence turns a setting into a storage problem. The default path, sending the key by iMessage, puts it inside an account on a device that your Legacy Contact may replace, wipe, or lose long before they ever need the key. The gap between setting this up and needing it is usually measured in decades. Very little survives a decade inside one message thread.
Apple’s own guidance is to print a copy and keep it with your estate planning documents, and it goes further: it tells the recipient that the key may have been stored with the estate documents and will reach them only after the death. Apple is describing a binder without naming one. Whatever you use, the key needs to sit somewhere your family will actually look, alongside the will and the policies, rather than only on a phone. Our death binder guide covers where that material belongs and the failure mode that catches most people, which is the binder nobody can find.
Two items, and then a wait. They need the access key and your death certificate. Documentation varies by country: in Japan, for example, Apple asks for a family certificate instead. Uploads have to be legible scans with all four page edges visible.
They can start the request on an Apple device under the same Legacy Contact screen, or on the web through Apple’s Digital Legacy site if they do not own one. Apple reviews and verifies every request by hand and emails when the review is finished or when it needs more from them.
The detail nobody mentions: the access expires. Apple grants the Legacy Contact account for three years from the approval of the first request, after which the account is permanently deleted. Anything the family wants to keep has to be downloaded inside that window. Three years feels generous right up until you consider that the first year after a death is usually spent on probate, not on archiving a photo library.
Request process, expiry, and access-key replacement policy from Apple, “Request access to an Apple Account as a Legacy Contact” (Apple’s published date: April 2, 2026), checked August 4, 2026.
Most are not. Google has an Inactive Account Manager and Meta has a legacy contact for Facebook, and each works on different terms, releases different things, and has to be set up separately while you are alive. Setting one is not setting the others. Google’s differs from Apple’s in one way worth knowing: it fires on inactivity rather than on a death certificate, so it cannot be invoked by your family after the fact if you never switched it on.
The comparison table in what happens to my accounts when I die lays the three side by side, including what each one documents that it will not do.
Adding the Legacy Contact closes one gap on one platform. The gaps that actually strand families are the ones no platform setting reaches.
That last mile is what Trusted Directive was built for. Your documents and account inventory live in one secure vault today; Gap Discovery alerts for the pieces still missing, and the Verify-Silence Release Protocol that hands the right documents to the right person if you go silent when it matters, for incapacity as well as death, are in development for alpha.
This is a plain-English overview of a published Apple feature, not legal advice. Digital-asset and probate rules vary by state. For your situation, ask an estate attorney licensed where you live.
Bank accounts, email, subscriptions, and logins, account by account, plus what each platform’s legacy tool leaves out.
What belongs in a death binder, section by section, and the failure mode nobody mentions.
A checklist by deadline: the first 48 hours, the first two weeks, and the first six months.
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