How to delete your PayPal account and transaction history

PayPal makes it easy to delete your account. It is also possible to recover all data from your account. Here’s how to do it.

PayPal is one of the world’s most popular platforms for sending and receiving money. It is popular because it offers users good protection when buying from online resellers. If something goes wrong during a transaction, such as if products or services are not delivered as promised, users can dispute the purchase and get their money back.

The procedure is much easier than calling the bank to cancel the transaction. It is for this reason that PayPal remains one of the most popular platforms today.

That being said, if you want to manage your PayPal account and want to delete your transaction history, for example, we have good news and bad news for you.

The bad news is that you cannot delete transaction history. Previously, they could be archived, but now the operation is not possible, and they are even more visible. In a way, this is good because it helps make things more transparent, but if you have purchases that you don’t want to show, it’s impossible to remove them individually.

The good news is that you can delete your entire transaction history. But for this, you will need to delete your PayPal account. If you don’t have many transactions or if the account is not related to your work, this option is worth considering.

Recover Your PayPal Data

Before you completely close your account, it may be worth restoring your data first. The operation will create an offline history of all PayPal transactions you’ve made with that account so you can refer to it whenever needed, whether it’s creating your own accounts or justifying a refund, a walk or whatever.

If you don’t want or need to download all your account data and history, you can skip this step and proceed to the next one to delete your PayPal account.

1. Sign in to your PayPal account.
2. Click on the small cogwheel, then on Data and Privacy.
3. In the Manage Data section, click Upload Data.
4. There you will be able to select all the information you want to save, select the type of output file and click Submit Request. You then need to wait while your request is processed.

If you don’t want all your data, just your history:

1. Click Activity, then Statements, then Custom.
2. Select the period of activity you want to recover, as well as the output format.
3. Click Create Report.
4. You will receive the specified report by email when it is ready.

Delete your PayPal account

1. Sign in to your PayPal account.
2. Click the star icon.
3. In the Account Settings section, click Close Account.

Be aware that if you create a new PayPal account with the same email address, everything will be lost, your account will be like new. If this is really what you want to do and you really want all your PayPal data to be gone, then this is the right way to go.