Delete an organization

You can delete an organization resource to permanently decommission your centralized Google Cloud hierarchy and remove top-level administrative control. Because an organization resource is bound to your Google Workspace account, deleting it permanently affects all associated resources and domain governance.

Alternatives to deleting an organization

If you prefer not to use the organization resource, consider restoring its Identity and Access Management (IAM) allow policy to its default state instead. This alternative lets users create projects and billing accounts, and lets the Google Workspace super administrator recover central administration if needed.

To restore the organization's allow policy to its default state, complete the following steps:

  1. Add your domain to the Project Creator and Billing Account Creator roles.

  2. Remove all other entries in the organization's allow policy.

Before you delete an organization

Before you can delete your organization, you must delete all resources within the organization, as well as any organization-level resources. If you don't remove these resources, the deletion process will be blocked.

Ensure you have completed the following cleanup steps:

  1. Delete all projects: You must shut down all projects in the organization. For instructions, see Creating and managing projects.
  2. Delete all folders: You must delete all folders in the organization. For instructions, see Creating and managing folders.
  3. Delete organization-level resources: You must delete any resources defined at the organization level that could block deletion. These include:
    • Organization-level firewall policies: Delete any firewall policies associated with the organization.
    • Access Context Manager policies: Delete any Access Policies.
    • Tags: Delete all tag keys and values associated with the organization.

Find blocking resources

You can use the Google Cloud CLI and Cloud Asset Inventory to search for resources that might block organization deletion.

To search for organization-level firewall policies and Access Context Manager policies, run the following command:

gcloud asset search-all-resources \
    --scope='organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID' \
    --asset-types='identity.accesscontextmanager.googleapis.com/AccessPolicy,compute.googleapis.com/FirewallPolicy' \
    --order-by='createTime'

Replace ORGANIZATION_ID with your unique organization resource ID. See gcloud asset search-all-resources for more information.

How to delete an organization

To delete your organization and all the resources associated with it, delete your Google Workspace account. For Cloud Identity users, cancel all other Google services, and then delete your user account. This action is potentially very damaging and might be impossible to reverse completely, so you should only take this action if you are certain no resources are in active use.