Changing the admins of a Workspace or board

See Adding an admin to your Workspace if you are already an administrator of your Workspace and wish to add additional administrators.

This article is intended to be used by people who need to recover a Workspace or board when one of the administrators leaves the company. The article is written with Workspaces in mind, but it also applies to administrators on a board as well.

Options for changing admins when the only admin leaves

When there is only one admin of a Workspace and that person leaves or is no longer using Trello, there is a loss of continuity in administering the Workspace in Trello. While this situation is not ideal, you have several options to reclaim ownership of the Workspace, the boards, and/or the data on the boards.

1. Upgrade to Standard or Premium

If you need to recover a board, and that board belongs to your Workspace, you can upgrade your Workspace to Trello Standard or Trello Premium, which adds several features to make managing Workspaces a bit easier, including the ability for Workspace administrators to take control over all boards in the Workspace.

2. Recovering an account by password or email address

Another option if the user's associated email address is a company email address (e.g., jim@yourcompany.com), you probably have access to their inbox by way of your email management system administrator. Trigger a password reset at https://id.atlassian.com/login/resetpassword and reset their password, then log into their Trello account. Then, make yourself admin over the boards in question. After that, log in as yourself and remove the user from the boards (and maybe make a couple of Workspace members admin over those boards to avoid this situation in the future).

3. Check to see if there are other administrators

There may already be more than one admin for your Workspace. You can check by visiting your Workspace page in Trello and looking for the admin indicator on the avatars of your members. See Presence and admin indicators on user avatars to see what the admin indicator looks like. If there is already another administrator, contact them about setting up additional admins.

4. Contact the former administrator

If you are able to contact the admin who left the Workspace, ask them to log into Trello and add you as an administrator of the Workspace. Once you are an administrator, you can make any changes you wish

"Can you make me the admin for this Workspace?"

For security reasons, we are unable to modify the administrators of a Workspace or delete a Workspace. See Why Support can't grant access to your account for a detailed explanation.

Who is the admin on my free Workspace?

All members invited to your free Workspaces are granted Workspace admin status by default. Should you need greater permission granularity, you may want to upgrade the Workspace to Standard or Premium, where Workspace members can be downgraded to non-admin status.

If you're not able to change admins after the previous admin leaves

If the only admin is no longer affiliated with your Workspace, you're unable to contact them, you don't know their password, and they were not using a company email address for their Trello account, you will not be able to gain control of the Workspace. If this is the case, these steps can help you get going with a new Workspace.

1. Set up a new Workspace

If you're not able to gain admin access to your previous Workspace, you can create a new Workspace in Trello and set up admins for the new Workspace as appropriate.

2. Set up multiple admins

When you have multiple administrators for your Workspace, you lower the risk of losing continuity of control when an administrator leaves the company or Workspace. 

3. Move the boards from the old Workspace to the new one

Even if you are not an administrator of the old Workspace, you may still be admin of boards within that Workspace. If so, you can change the Workspace to which a board belongs to move existing boards to the new Workspace.

4. Copy any boards you're not able to move to the new Workspace

If you're a normal member of a board (but not an admin), you can copy the board and then add the copied board to the new Workspace. Optionally, you may wish to delete cards from the board that belongs to the old Workspace. Another option is to create a new board, and then move each list from the old board to the new one. Unlike copying a board, this will preserve the comments and history of the cards.

5. Canceling Standard or Premium

If you are an admin of your Workspace, you can cancel Trello Standard or Premium via the link at the bottom of your Workspace's billing page.

If you are not an admin of the Workspace (or no longer have access to the Workspace), the most direct approach is to contact another admin in the Workspace and ask them to cancel Standard or Premium.

If you are not an admin of the Workspace, are unable to contact another admin to cancel, and wish to cancel Standard or Premium so that your credit card is no longer charged, please contact Trello support. While we are unable to grant control of the Workspace by adding additional admins, we can cancel the subscription on your behalf. Some proof of purchase may be required. The Workspace won't lose any data when the subscription is canceled.