How to see deactivated accounts in Slack
Go to slack.com/admin (you need to be a Workspace Owner or Admin), then click Members. By default this shows active members. To see deactivated accounts, click the filter icon and change the status filter from "Active" to "Deactivated".
This gives you the full list of deactivated members — their name, email, when they were deactivated, and their previous role. You can search within this list by name or email if you're looking for a specific person.
On Business+ and Enterprise Grid, the Analyticssection (Settings & administration → Analytics → Members) also lets you filter by deactivated status with more detail — last active date, total messages, etc.
How Slack billing actually works
Slack charges per "active member" on Pro and Business+ plans — someone counts as active if they've used Slack at all in the past 30 days. If they haven't, Slack automatically credits that seat and doesn't charge for it that month.
This is different from Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, where you pay for every assigned license regardless of whether anyone logs in. Slack's credit system handles the truly-gone users automatically. But there's still a case for auditing: someone who logs in once a month to check a channel still counts as active and still bills. And former employees who were never properly deactivated can still read your internal channels.
Finding members who should be deactivated (but aren't yet)
Deactivated accounts are accounts you've already removed. The separate problem is members who are still active in Slack but haven't logged in for months — former employees, old contractors, people who just stopped using it.
In the admin Members list, sort by "Last active" to bring the least recently active members to the top. Anyone with no activity in the last 30–60 days is worth reviewing. Export the list as CSV if you have a lot of members to go through.
On Business+ and Enterprise Grid, the Analytics tab gives you more granular data: last active date, days active in the past 30 days, and total messages sent.
Deactivated vs. removed — what happens to their data
In Slack, you don't "delete" members in the traditional sense — you deactivate them. Deactivating a member:
- Removes their access to the workspace immediately
- Stops billing for that seat (they're no longer active)
- Preserves all their message history — their past messages stay visible to the rest of the workspace
- Keeps their profile in the member directory, marked as deactivated
You can reactivate a deactivated member at any time, which restores their access and profile. Their message history was never touched.
How to deactivate members in bulk
The admin interface lets you deactivate one member at a time, which gets tedious if you have a long list. For bulk operations, Slack has a SCIM APIthat supports bulk deactivation if you're on Enterprise Grid. On lower plans, the easiest approach is the admin UI — it's slow but works.
One alternative for larger workspaces: some teams use slack-export-viewer or the Slack API (users.list endpoint) to pull all members with their updated and deleted flags, then deactivate via the SCIM API if on Enterprise Grid. There's an undocumented users.admin.setInactiveendpoint that's seen in community scripts, but it's not in Slack's official API docs and could stop working without notice — not something to build a workflow around.
A few things to check first
Before deactivating anyone, a few quick checks:
- Bot and app accounts. Integrations and bots show up in your member list. They won't have recent "activity" in the way a person would. Don't deactivate bot accounts — it breaks the integrations.
- Channel ownership. If a member owns private channels, deactivating them can create issues. Check whether they own any channels and transfer ownership first.
- Guest accounts. Slack has single-channel and multi-channel guests at different price points. If you're on a plan with guest billing, check whether any guests are inactive too.
Staying on top of it
Slack's auto-credit system means the financial stakes of a Slack audit are lower than M365 or Google Workspace— you're not going to find months of surprise charges. But access hygiene matters independently of cost. People who left last year shouldn't still be able to read your internal channels.
Reach Seatsincludes Slack in its daily sync alongside Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, GitHub, Zoom, and Jira. It surfaces members who haven't been active in 30+ days so you can review and deactivate from one place, without logging into each admin console separately.