Google Workspace: secondary calendars are now deleted or suspended with their owner from 5 October 2026, transfer them before offboarding

Google Workspace: secondary calendars are now deleted or suspended with their owner from 5 October 2026, transfer them before offboarding

5 October 2026 — Google announced on 5 October 2026 that secondary calendars in Google Workspace now follow the lifecycle of the person who owns them. When a user account is deleted, every secondary calendar that user owns is deleted with it. When an account is suspended, those calendars are suspended as well. This brings secondary calendars into line with how primary calendars have always behaved, and it applies to non-personal Workspace accounts.

Not yet independently verified. Single source: Google's own Workspace Updates post. No independent report of the change had been found on 6 October 2026, and how quickly it reaches each domain depends on Google's rollout. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

What changed

A secondary calendar is any calendar a user creates beyond their own primary one: a team rota, an on-call schedule, a room or equipment booking calendar created by hand, a shared project or release calendar. In many organisations these were created years ago by someone who has since left, and they kept working because deleting the creator did not remove them. That no longer holds. Google says a secondary calendar must be tied to a valid owner, because the owner determines which organisational settings and policies apply to the data.

The rollout is described as extended, potentially longer than 15 days for the feature to appear, starting on 5 October 2026 for both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains.

Who is affected

Every Workspace administrator who deletes or suspends user accounts. The risk sits in offboarding: the next time an account is removed under the normal leaver process, any team calendars it owns disappear for everyone subscribed to them. Suspension is also affected, which matters for organisations that suspend accounts during long leave or investigations, because the shared calendars go dark for the whole team while the owner is suspended.

What to do

1. Before the next round of account deletions, find the secondary calendars owned by users who are leaving, suspended or likely to be removed. Admins can transfer secondary calendars in the Admin console or through the Calendar API, and users can transfer their own in Calendar settings.
2. Move important shared calendars to a dedicated owner, such as a service or team account that will not be offboarded.
3. Add a calendar-ownership transfer step to the leaver checklist, alongside the existing transfers of Drive files and email.
4. Tell staff who suspend accounts during leave that their team calendars will be suspended with them.
5. If you rely on an identity-management or HR tool to delete accounts automatically, check whether it can transfer calendars first or whether that step now needs to be done by hand.

Why it matters

Calendars are rarely listed in data-retention policies, yet they often carry operational schedules that teams depend on. A change like this turns an invisible dependency into a deletion during routine administration. The fix is cheap if done before the next offboarding and awkward afterwards.

Sources

• Google Workspace Updates: Secondary calendars will now follow the lifecycle of their owner — 5 October 2026