Secondary accounts when your team pays

On a team, a secondary account never takes a seat. A seat belongs to the person whose account is covered, and a secondary is counted against that person's limits, the same way it is on any plan. So adding an assistant or a partner as a secondary does not add to the team's seat count.

Once the team has started, if the person they are a secondary of is removed from the team as a Managed member, the secondary is not deleted. A secondary who lives inside that person's account gets an account of their own on the Free plan.

What a secondary gets when the team pays

A secondary uses the limits of their primary, the person whose account they were added to. When the team covers that person, those limits are the Team plan's. In the plan settings, the Team plan has no cap on secondary accounts. It allows 12 accounts and 30 connections.

What a secondary can and cannot do does not change because a team is paying. See What a secondary account is and Understanding primaries and secondaries.

A secondary is not a team member and cannot join or start a team from inside someone's account: see Why you can only be on one team.

The team can decide who may have secondaries

A team can switch on a policy called No secondaries. Members and Admins then cannot have secondaries unless one of their groups gives them the ability to Have secondary accounts. The Owner is not affected, and nobody is deleted. When the rule takes effect, secondaries a person already has are ended: one living in their account gets an account of their own on Free, and one with their own account is unlinked. Both are emailed. See Team policies and Team groups and permissions.

When the person they belong to is removed

Once a team has started, removing a Managed member freezes their account, and a secondary is never deleted along with it. What happens depends on where the secondary lives.

• A secondary living inside the member's account gets an account of its own, on the Free plan, and is emailed about it. Their syncs are then counted against the Free plan, and anything beyond what Free allows is paused. The email says how many are running and how many were paused.
• A secondary who already had an account of their own is unlinked from the member. Their account and plan are untouched.
• An invitation still waiting to become a secondary is withdrawn.

A sync that ran only between two of the secondary's own calendars is handed over to them rather than stopped, and keeps running if the Free plan has room.

Releasing a Managed member, or a Sponsored member leaving, is different: those people keep their account, so the secondaries in it stay with them. See Leaving, removing and releasing people from a team.

What to know

• A secondary who is split off into their own Free account is emailed about it. A secondary with their own account who is unlinked because the member was removed is not emailed; under the No secondaries rule they are.
• The person who added a secondary can remove them at any time.
• You cannot delete your own account while you still have secondaries. See Deleting your account when you are on a team.