How to Remove Former Employee License and User account in Office 365

Here we will discuss how to delete or remove Former Employee’s License on Office 365, this is a very important part of Office 365 Admin.

If any of the Employee has left your organization then we don’t need to pay for a License after they left. What basically we need to do is just we remove the license from the user before deleting the User account from Office 365. We have the option of assigning the same license to another user and to continue with the same services.

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Remove Former Employee License in Office 365

Below are the steps to configure the same:

Make sure you have admin rights, then sign in with your Office 365 global admin account.

Now go to the Office 365 Admin center and select users which you wish to remove or use the same subscription for other users.

Now, select the name of the employee you want to delete and then select Edit next to Product License from the user details Pop-up.

Now click on edit for Go to Product licenses pane and slide the license indicator making to Off position

dealing with terminated employees in office 365

Once done click on the save button to save the same. Now we can check License availability will be from 25 to 24, now the same license we can assign to other users.

We can continue following these methods of license removal until you do not hire other persons to work with your group.

Deleting Former Employee’s User Account on Office 365

Make sure you have admin rights, then sign in with your Office 365 global admin account.

Now go to Office 365 Admin center and select users which you wish to remove after removing the license.

office 365 delete mailbox without deleting user

Now click on the Delete user option as above screenshots, it will take us Delete User page on the user properties. Here we need to click on the Delete option.

Also, we can see there is any other option for preventing access:

We can block the user from signing on.
Reset the user’s password
From this option, we can remove product License

There is a link called “Would you like to know more” about learning about Options for preventing user access to Office 365 & Best practices when removing users from your organization.

Once click on delete it will take some time to delete the same user.

Once user will be deleted we will get confirmation about user has been deleted.

delete user from office 365 using powershell

There is another method to delete a user from Office 365, we can click on the more tab from the Active user page.

On the user delete user page, we need to search username and select the username

Remove Former Employee License in Office 365

It will ask for confirmation and delete the user account.

You may like the following Office 365 tutorials:

I hope this article will be helpful to remove former employee license and user account in Office 365.

Bijay Kumar

After working for more than 15 years in Microsoft technologies like SharePoint, Office 365, and Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI), I thought will share my SharePoint expertise knowledge with the world. Our audiences are from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, etc. For my expertise knowledge and SharePoint tutorials, Microsoft has been awarded a Microsoft SharePoint MVP (9 times). I have also worked in companies like HP, TCS, KPIT, etc.