Are Your Days of Freeloading Netflix Over? Here's How to Transfer Your Profile

Don't lose your Netflix profile once you lose access to a shared account.

For a long time, people have been easily able to share Netflix passwords -- even with people outside of their immediate families. This will soon come to an end, though, as Netflix cracks down on this money-loser and takes steps to ensure more people open accounts of their own or pay for password sharing beginning in 2023.

If you're losing your access to free Netflix, you may need to get out the credit cards to pay the monthly subscription fee for an account of your own. If you decide the streaming service is worth keeping, the good news is that you can transfer over your profile so you don't lose your list and viewing history.

Here's how to make that happen.

This process lets you transfer your Netflix profile

Transferring your Netflix profile is very easy. You'll have to start by signing into your account on your computer. Once you've logged in, navigate up to the top right where you'll see a square blue smiley face icon that you can click on. This allows you to select which profile you're on, and it also contains an option in the pulldown menu that says "Transfer Profile."

When you click on "Transfer Profile," you'll be asked if you want to allow profile transfers and given a little description of what this process means. For example, Netflix explains that transferring profiles won't delete the profile on your account or log out of other devices.

Netflix generally takes two days to enable the ability to transfer the profile. However, the main account holder will receive a confirmation email allowing you to enable the feature instantly if you click on a link in the email. If you don't have access to the email address for the main account holder, you'll either need to contact them to set up this feature or wait two days for your profile to be transferred.

Once profile transfers have been enabled, you can go back to the same "Transfer Profiles" option accessed from pulling down the blue smiley face. This time, though, you'll be able to enter the email address and password to use for your new account. You'll have to go through the steps of setting that up. Once you've completed them, your profile will be transferred to your own Netflix account and you'll be able to keep your viewing history and all of your recommendations.

Should you open your own Netflix account?

While you can easily keep your Netflix history on a new account by transferring your profile, consider whether opening your own Netflix account makes sense.

Once Netflix releases the details of how it will charge for password sharing, you may find it makes sense to just offer to pay the primary account holder the $3 or $4 or whatever the monthly cost is of continuing to get access to the streaming service on their account. If this isn't an option, think about whether you actually watch Netflix enough to cover the full monthly cost of a plan.

If you have lots of streaming services you're subscribed to already, you may want to just defer for a while to wait and see how much you actually miss having access to Netflix once it's gone.