Apple Legacy Contact: What Your Family Gets — and the Passwords It Doesn't

Short answer: no. An Apple Legacy Contact inherits a great deal of your Apple Account — but not your passwords, not your passkeys and not your saved payment details. For many people those are exactly the things that matter most.

Apple is explicit about it, and it is not an oversight.

Based on Apple’s support and platform-security documentation as of October 2026. Apple’s current instructions are at support.apple.com/102631.

What a Legacy Contact gets

A Legacy Contact is someone you nominate to access your Apple Account after you die. To use it they need two things: the access key you generated when you added them, and your death certificate (the documents required vary by country or region). They do not need an Apple Account or an Apple device of their own.

With those, Apple says they can reach data such as your photos, messages, notes, files, device backups and more — and they can decide what to do with it, including deleting it permanently.

Some of that is end-to-end encrypted — health data and voice memos, for instance — and Apple says a Legacy Contact “might be asked to enter your Legacy Contact access key” to reach it. So end-to-end encryption is not, in itself, what puts something out of reach. Which makes the next part a deliberate decision rather than a side effect.

What they don’t get

Apple lists two exclusions:

• Anything you bought — movies, music, books and subscriptions.
• Your iCloud Keychain — passwords, passkeys and payment information.

The Keychain exclusion is built into the cryptography, not just written into a policy. Apple’s platform-security guide explains that a Legacy Contact’s key is structured like a Recovery Contact’s, “except that the keying information used by a beneficiary doesn’t encompass the information necessary to decrypt the decedent’s iCloud Keychain.” In plain terms: the missing piece was never put into the packet your family receives, so no amount of paperwork produces it later. There is nothing to appeal to.

That is the right design. It is also why a Legacy Contact on its own is not an inheritance plan.

And the access is not permanent

This is the part almost nobody mentions, and it changes what you should do with the time.

A Legacy Contact’s access runs for three years from when Apple approves the first request — not three years from your death, and not three years per contact. Apple’s wording for what happens next is blunt: “After this time, the account is permanently deleted.” So the window is for retrieving things, not for storing them. Anything your family wants to keep has to be downloaded and moved somewhere of their own inside it.

If you are nominating someone, that belongs in what you tell them: there is a clock, it starts when they first get in, and the account does not survive it.

The gap, and why it is the part that matters

Consider what someone actually needs after a death:

• the email account that resets everything else — its password is in the Keychain;
• banking and investment logins — Keychain, or another password manager;
• the password manager itself, if you use one — its master password is in your head;
• crypto — a seed phrase or keys that were never in any Apple account;
• two-factor codes — on your phone, behind your face.

Photos and messages are precious. But the things that let a family settle an estate are almost all in the gap.

Filling it

1. Add a Legacy Contact anyway. It is free, it takes minutes, and it solves photos, messages, notes, files and backups cleanly. You need iOS 15.2, iPadOS 15.2 or macOS Monterey 12.1 or later and two-factor authentication; your contact must be over 13 (varies by country), and you can add more than one. On the access key, take Apple’s own advice and “print and save a copy of their access key with your estate planning documents” — the iMessage copy it offers to send is convenient and lives in the one place a new phone might not inherit.

2. Use your password manager’s own inheritance feature. Most offer emergency access or a nominated heir who can request your vault after a waiting period you control. That covers passwords the Keychain will not hand over.

3. Keep printed recovery codes for the accounts that matter — your primary email, your Apple or Google account and your password manager — with your important papers. Why printed, and why not on your phone, is in Where to Store Your 2FA Recovery Codes.

4. Give crypto its own plan. Seed phrases never pass through any Apple feature. The arrangement that works is a threshold — nobody can act alone today, the right people can act together later — set out in What Happens to Your Crypto When You Die?

5. Write a letter of instruction that says what exists, where the pieces are and whom to call — and contains no secret itself.

Where StegoSafe fits

There is a useful property hidden in the list of what does pass: files in iCloud Drive go to your Legacy Contact. That makes iCloud Drive a reasonable delivery channel for an encrypted backup your family should eventually receive — as long as the encryption means the file is useless to anyone before then, and as long as you remember the three-year clock above. It is the postbox, not the archive: the instruction to your family is to download the files, not to leave them where they found them.

StegoSafe can be that backup. It encrypts a seed phrase or a list of recovery codes on your device and writes it into a separate PNG; it can split one secret across several photos so that any k of n, together with a passphrase, recover it. Keep those PNGs as files in iCloud Drive — not in the Photos app, where images may be converted — and they pass to your Legacy Contact with everything else.

The passphrase does not go in iCloud. Give it, sealed, to your executor or solicitor, as in the inheritance plan linked above. Then:

• your Legacy Contact holds encrypted files and no passphrase;
• your executor holds a passphrase to nothing;
• together — which is the point — they can recover it.

Choose the mode deliberately. For anything meant to be inherited, use portable password mode. StegoSafe’s device-bound mode ties a secret to your device and your current enrolled Face ID or Touch ID: the key is random, held in that device’s keychain, marked non-exportable and this-device-only, and released only by those biometrics — change them and the original device key can no longer be used. Nothing in it is transferable, so there is nothing for a Legacy Contact to receive. It is the strongest mode for your own use and the wrong one for your family’s.

The short version

1. A Legacy Contact gets your photos, messages, notes, files and backups.
2. It does not get your iCloud Keychain — no passwords, passkeys or payment details — and Apple’s key design means it never can.
3. The access lasts three years from the first approved request, and then the account is deleted — so it is a window for downloading, not a place to leave things.
4. Add one anyway; then fill the gap with your password manager’s inheritance feature, printed recovery codes, a separate crypto plan and a letter of instruction.
5. Encrypted files in iCloud Drive do pass on — keep the passphrase somewhere else, and tell your family to download the files.