Assign, remove, and reassign licenses

Applies to editions of Google Workspace, Cloud Identity Premium, and other paid subscriptions in your Google Admin console.

In some cases, Google automatically assigns a license for a service to every user in your entire organization. In other cases, you can manually assign licenses to your entire organization, an organizational unit, a group of users, or an individual user. You can also turn on the option to automatically assign licenses to users.

You assign and manage licenses in 3 places in the Google Admin console:

  • The Billing page—Use to assign licenses to all users in your organization or an uploaded list of users or to set up automatic licensing.
  • The Users page—Useful for assigning licenses to multiple users, but not all users in your organization. You can manage licenses for multiple users using a CSV file.
  • An individual user’s page—Good for managing a single user.

Assign and remove licenses

These steps are for assigning and removing user licenses. If you want to reduce your license count, go to Reduce licenses instead.

If you remove a user’s license, you might lose their data. To retain the data, you can instead archive the user. For details, go to Archive former employee accounts.

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Automatically assign a license to every user in your organization

You can assign a license to every user in your organization automatically from the License settings page.

  • If you have multiple Google services or multiple subscriptions of the same service, you can only turn on automatic licensing for one service or subscription.
  • If you choose to automatically assign licenses for a service to all users, you can’t remove an individual user’s license.
  • If you have organizational units under your top-level organization, you can set automatic licensing options for specific organizational units.
  • It can take up to 24 hours for an automatically assigned license to take effect.
  • If turning on automatic licensing for a subscription results in assigning more than the available number of licenses, some users might not get a license.

If you use Google Cloud Directory Sync, you must pick one way to automatically assign licenses—either the option in the Google Admin console described here or with Google Cloud Directory Sync.

  1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

    Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

  2. In the Admin console, go to Menu and then Billingand thenLicense settings.
  3. Click to the service you want to assign licenses for.
  4. Click Offand thenselect On.
  5. If you have multiple subscriptions of the same service, choose which subscription to use for automatic license assignment.
  6. Click Save.
Manually assign and remove licenses on an individual user's page
  1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

    Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

  2. In the Admin console, go to Menu and then Directoryand thenUsers.
  3. Next to each user’s name where you want to assign or remove a license, check the box.
  4. At the top, click Moreand thenAssign Licenses or Remove Licenses.
  5. Click the serviceand thenAssign or Remove.
Manually assign and remove licenses on an individual user's page
  1. Sign in to your Google Admin console.

    Sign in using your administrator account (does not end in @gmail.com).

  2. In the Admin console, go to Menu and then Directoryand thenUsers.
  3. Click the name of the user you want to manage.
  4. Scroll down and click the user’s License section.
  5. Click any service to display the on/off switches in the Status column.
  6. Next to a service, in the Status column, click the switch to assign or remove a license.
  7. Click Save.
Assign licenses to multiple users from a CSV file

You can assign licenses to multiple users when you use a CSV file to bulk add or update users:

  1. Follow the instructions described in Add or update multiple users from a CSV file.
  2. For the users you want to add licenses to, add the SKU IDs to the New Licenses [UPLOAD ONLY] column of the CSV file.

    Use the SKU IDs listed here: https://developers.google.com/admin-sdk/licensing/v1/how-tos/products.

A spreadsheet can include up to 200 existing users that are being assigned new licenses.

You can assign a license to a user only if the user does not already have a mutually exclusive license. For example, if you try to assign a Business Standard license to a user who already has a Business Starter license, the license reassignment fails.

You cannot revoke licenses by using a CSV file.

Reassign licenses

You can’t directly reassign a license for a Google service from one user to another. Instead, follow any of the procedures above to unassign the license from the original user and then assign it to the new user.

After you unassign a license, it might take up to 24 hours before you can reassign the license to a different user.

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