Emergency access and family sharing in your password manager

How a trusted person can reach your passwords if you cannot: Bitwarden's emergency access, 1Password's recovery and Emergency Kit, and what Proton Pass offers.

Key points

If you die, fall ill, or forget your main password, your passwords are locked away for good, unless you prepared. The makers cannot open your vault.
Bitwarden lets a trusted person request access to your vault. If you do not refuse within a waiting time you set, they get it.
In 1Password Families, a family organizer can recover the account of a member who cannot sign in.

Why you need to plan for this

Because the makers cannot read your vault, they cannot hand it to your family either. Without preparation, the passwords to your email, your bank, and your photos stay locked when you can no longer open them yourself. Each manager solves this differently.

Bitwarden: emergency access

You name a trusted person, who needs a free or paid Bitwarden account on the same server as you. Two kinds of access are possible:

	What the trusted person gets
View	read access to all items in your personal vault, including passwords and attachments
Takeover	sets a new master password and gets full access to your vault; your old master password and your two-step login methods are removed

The trusted person sends a request. You can approve it at once. Otherwise it is granted after the waiting time you chose when you set up the access. Emergency access is part of Premium and of Bitwarden’s paid family and business plans. The Families plan covers up to 6 users.

1Password: recovery and Emergency Kit

In 1Password Families, a family organizer can start a recovery for a member who cannot sign in or unlock 1Password. The member gets an email, a new Secret Key, and creates a new account password. Afterward, they have access to all their vaults and items again, and their two-factor sign-in is reset.

For your own account, 1Password advises giving a copy of your Emergency Kit to someone you trust. The kit holds your Secret Key and has space for your account password.

Proton Pass

Proton lists emergency access as a feature of its paid plans, not of Proton Pass Free.

What you can do

Choose one or two people you trust, and talk to them before you add them.
Set up emergency access in your manager, with a waiting time long enough for you to refuse a request you did not expect, for example a week.
Put a sealed copy of your recovery sheet in a safe place your family knows, for example with your will.
Test it once: have the trusted person send a request, check that you get notified, and then refuse it.
Share household passwords through a family plan, not by sending them in messages.

Next step

The guide Check for leaked passwords shows how a manager finds passwords that have appeared in data leaks.

The figures in this guide come from the archive and change with every data update. As of November 13, 2026.